Strangers are spying on your child. And schools are paying them to do it.
Students are now returning to classrooms that are so wired with surveillance and monitoring technology that they may begin to see George Orwell’s "1984" as an aspirational tale.
In Orwell's novel, a tightly controlled public is plied with government propaganda and watched over by telescreens. But even Orwell couldn’t have foreseen how modern surveillance technology would make his telescreens look primitive.
In today’s classrooms, students and teachers are monitored by a complex set of surveillance tools – found in software such as Turnitin, ClassDojo, Illuminate Education and G Suite for Education, and hardware such as Chromebooks and Apple tablets – that enable both technology management and law enforcement to monitor classrooms, school libraries and reading lists. This is in addition to the smartphones in most students’ and teachers’ pockets, which are listening as well.
COVID-19 pandemic accelerated use of data mining
The monitoring technologies were in development long before anyone had heard of COVID-19, but the pandemic opened the floodgates for their use. In those stressful days when classroom learning went digital, surveillance, mining and monitoring of young people exploded.
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For many, there seemed to be no choice. Gathering in classrooms felt too unsafe for several months and digital technologies swooped in, promising free or low-cost, convenient ways to maintain learning.
While ostensibly about convenience, these tools also allowed for the wholesale surveillance of students and teachers. The resulting loss of privacy and autonomy stands to be a windfall for the companies making it all possible.
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Big Tech’s economic viability rests on tracking and surveilling users for the purpose of predicting and modifying their behavior through data collection and analysis. They sell their analysis to companies interested in modifying users’ attitudes and behavior. This unprecedented access to the precious data of children enables tech giants to track them for life.
Tech firms share information with governments
Big Tech also shares information with governments, both domestically and internationally. As part of these efforts, they provide content to law enforcement. Recently, a teen and her mother were charged in Nebraska with crimes after the mother helped the daughter procure pills to induce an abortion. Facebook provided law enforcement with the communication between the mother and daughter so an arrest could be made.
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Students’ privacy was historically protected under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974, which granted students and their guardians control over the release of their education records. However, schools and districts are legally allowed to disclose educational records to educational service providers.
As a result, these companies can collect student data, but it is not clear whether they are also sharing it. Vague language around what they are collecting or doing with the data prevents students, parents or teachers from knowing how their privacy is being compromised.
Schools are becoming the testing ground for new surveillance technologies in large part because compulsory education makes the vast majority of young people in America a captive audience.
Often introduced under the guise of safety, surveillance technologies collect copious amounts of data, beyond what might be needed for educational purposes.
For example, Bark, a product specifically designed to monitor students' communications, has the capability to read all student data, including emails, web searches and social media posts. If any red flag words are scanned, school administrators are informed immediately.
At stake is something not measured as easily as data. In "1984," Orwell showed how people self-censor when they realize they are being surveilled. We might never know how many ideas were suppressed or risks were not taken in the classroom that could have transformed those students, that community or our global society.
Even absent any sharing or selling of data, we have reason to be concerned. News media regularly report on school districts, colleges and universities who have experienced a data breach. One study found that there were more than 1,800 data breaches in schools between 2005 and 2021. Illuminate Education, a leading student-data tracking software, was recently breached, resulting in personal data on students across the nation being leaked, including attendance, migrant status and behavioral information.
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Ironically, as these cutting-edge technologies enter schools, calls for book bans, which many thought were a relic of the past, are becoming louder. Accelerated bans on critical race theory books have expanded in Ohio, a Michigan library was defunded for not removing LGBTQ+ books, and a Wisconsin district banned a book about Japanese internment camps during World War II.
Many surveillance tools are invisible
While news coverage has centered on the politics of these bills, this distracts from the larger, behind-the-scenes project by tech oligarchs to bring digital tools to educational spaces as a way to mine the data of students and families – and to track which materials are used or ignored.
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This school year, many students will enter classrooms that are carefully and systemically restructured with various tools of surveillance. Because many of these tools are invisible, students and their families will largely be kept ignorant of the forms of surveillance.
Teachers, students and families deserve full disclosure about how they are being surveilled, who is profiting from it and what it means for education.
Allison Butler is vice president of the Media Freedom Foundation and director of the Media Literacy Certificate Program in the Department of Communication at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Nolan Higdon is a Project Censored national judge and university lecturer at Merrill College and the Education Department at University of California, Santa Cruz.
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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: How Big Tech spies on America's kids while they're in school
