Surveillance, surveillance everywhere. Next stop, public schools.
In rural Weld county, Colorado, a school official got an alert from GoGuardian, a company that monitors students’ internet searches, that a student was doing a Google search for “how to kill myself” late one evening. The official worked with a social worker to call law enforcement to conduct an in-person safety check at the student’s home, said Dr Teresa Hernandez, the district’s chief intervention and safety officer. When the student’s mother answered the door, she was confused, and said that her child had been upstairs sleeping since 9pm. “We had the search history to show, actually, no, that’s not what was going on,” Hernandez said.
Federal law requires that American public schools block access to harmful websites, and that they “monitor” students’ online activities. What exactly this “monitoring” means has never been clearly defined: the Children’s Internet Protection Act, passed nearly 20 years ago, was driven in part by fears that American children might look at porn on federally funded school computers.
As technology has advanced and schools have integrated laptops and digital technology into every part of the school day, school districts have largely defined for themselves how to responsibly monitor students on school-provided devices – and how aggressive they think that monitoring should be.
Under digital surveillance: how American schools spy on millions of kids