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Southwest Times Record | Page A13 Sunday, 28 August 2022




Spies in the classroom How Big Tech monitors America’s students











Allison Butler and Nola Higdon



Special to USA TODAY



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
Data and G Suite, 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.



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.



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.



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.



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.



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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