Kids Are Back in Classrooms and Laptops Are Still Spying on Them

The interface of GoGuardian is familiar to high school teachers who use it to monitor student activity. The teacher sees thumbnail images of each student's laptop screen instead of seeing faces in each frame. They watch as students scroll through sonnets and then type in the word chlorofluorocarbon into a search bar. The teacher can remind the student to stay on task via a private message sent through GoGuardian if they are tempted by a distraction. The teacher can take control of the device and zap the tab if the student wanders away from the assignment a lot.

Student monitoring software has come under renewed scrutiny. Many students brought home school-issued devices when they were in the US. There was software baked into these machines that could allow teachers to view and control students screens, use artificial intelligence to read student emails and cloud-based documents, and send warnings of potential violent threats or mental health harms to teachers and law enforcement after school hours.

Now that the majority of American students are going back to school in person, the software that was put on their school-issued devices will continue to be watched. According to a report published today from the Center for Democracy and Technology, 89 percent of teachers say their schools will continue using student monitoring software, up 5 percentage points from last year. There are new concerns about the legality of abortion care in states that have legalized it. Concerns about how data collected through school-issued devices might be weaponized in September have been raised by proposals targeting the LGBTQ youth.

Monitoring software can help shrink the distance between classrooms and carceral systems. Forty-four percent of teachers said that at least one student at their school has been contacted by law enforcement because of a behavior flagged by the monitoring software. 37 percent of teachers who say their school uses activity monitoring outside of regular hours send the alert to a third party focused on public safety. The director of equity in civic technology at the CDT says that schools have made it harder for law enforcement to get to students' information.

The software may be used to criminalize students who seek reproductive health resources on school-issued devices, according to US senators Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey. Thousands of school districts and millions of American students can be monitored by four major companies.

There are a lot of concerns about teen mental health and school violence. Congress passed a law after the mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. Monitoring companies often boast of their ability to zero in on would-be attackers. Securly has a website that gives teachers insight into student activity for email, Google Drive, and Microsoft files. They are invited to approach student safety from every angle, across every platform, and identify students who might be at risk of harming themselves or others.

You can see me after class.

Lawmakers and privacy advocates were already concerned about the risks of student monitoring software before the Roe decision. The four companies that sell digital student-monitoring services to K-12 schools raised significant privacy and equity concerns. The investigation found that low-income students rely more heavily on school devices and are exposed to more surveillance than high-income students, and that schools and companies were often not required to reveal the extent of their monitoring to students. Some districts may choose to have a company send an alert to law enforcement instead of the school.

Students know that their hall monitors can be used wrong. An investigation by The 74 Million found that Gaggle would send students warning emails for harmless content. The district used software to reveal a student's sexuality to their parents, according to a high school newspaper. 13 percent of students know someone who has been outed as a result of student monitoring software. The editorial board of a Texas student newspaper argued that the use of the software could prevent students from seeking help for mental health issues.

There are always forms of abuse that come with virtue.

The director of Fight for the Future.

The accounts of monitoring software are concerning. I spoke to an associate principal who said his district would get email warnings about pornographic photos and profanities from students. The students were using their school-issued laptops. Teens would charge their phones while they were at home by connecting them to their laptop cables. The Gaggle software on the Chromebooks could detect when the teens were exchanging nude photos with significant others. The school doesn't want students to put their personal devices in their laptops.

The criminalization of reproductive health care in some states makes the problem worse. It isn't hard to imagine a student who lives in a state where ending a pregnancy is illegal using a search engine to find out-of-state abortion clinics. The teacher or administrator could inform the student's parent or law enforcement.