Student Surveillance Is Still A Scary Thing

Back in January of 2020, I predicted that one of the big stories of the coming year would be a growth in the student surveillance industry. I'd been following the story as it popped up, because it was everywhere. 

Florida (you know--the Freedom State) was implementing a huge student surveillance system. Colleges were using student phones for all manner of tracking. Public schools were experimenting with all sorts of creepy facial recognition and surveillance software. Audio surveillance was another great frontier. In 2019, California enacted the Cradle-to-Career Data Systems Act, intended to data mine the hell out of California's minor citizens. And that was on top of the old stuff like Pearson's crazy student surveillance to protect its tests (a story I can't fully relate because a piece about it was one of the few posts that Google ever took down on my blog).

So when I made that prediction in January of 2020, I felt I was making a pretty good prognostication. However, as you may recall, a few months later, education (and mush other) news was dominated by something else entirely. 

But the fact that we were all kind of distracted did not stop the march of ed tech's surveillance industry. How could they? It was like printing money, and it dovetailed perfectly with the longstanding interest in data mining children to get that womb-to-tomb pipeline up and running. No matter how creepy it seemed, it was a profitable way to fix it so that busy CEOs could log on and select meat widgets like picking out toasters on Amazon.

Ellen Barry just dropped a piece at the New York Times that, as the NYT is wont to do, accepts the framing of the folks who sell this stuff-- "Spying on Student Devices, Schools Aim to Intercept Self-Harm Before It Happens." 

This is always the pitch-- "Let us surveil your students during every possible moment of their day, and we will protect them from themselves and each other."

I don't mean to make light of this pitch. I have lost students and former students to suicide, and given the opportunity to prevent that, I'd be awfully inclined to take it. But at the moment, the "evidence" that this works is anecdotal at best. Here I am, forced to agree with Reason of all outlets, asking if this kind of spying on children is really doing any good?

And the cost of this kind of surveillance is pretty extreme. Barry tells a couple of the usual sorts of dramatic tales of a student who was headed off because of what they typed into their heavily monitored school-issued device. Much further down the page comes this paragraph--

Dramatic stories like that are unusual, though. Every day, Mr. Clubbs’s team sifts through and responds to the alerts, a task that occupies about a quarter of his work hours, and a third of his counselors’. He could not say how accurate the system was. “We’re not keeping any data like that,” he said. “We’re just responding to the alerts as they come in.”

Many students report being "caught" with false positives, or pranks. And some of these result in late night police visits to the home, which come with their own level of fraughtness. 

Barry calls identifying people at risk for suicide a "needle in a haystack" problem (linking to a 2022 article about using smartphones to spot suicide risks). There are about 7,000 deaths by suicide in people under 24 each year. A large number of those involved firearms; in 2022, there were 2,526 gun deaths in the 1-to-17 age group.

So why invest so much money in surveillance software rather than, say, tighter gun controls or more mental health services?

We can point at a couple of possible factors. One is that young humans don't have the same kind of lobbying and political power as gun fans. Children's lack of political clout makes them the path of least resistance for all sorts of policy ideas. We've seen this too many times in education--poverty is bad, so let's fix it by making children take standardized tests every year so that they'll get better scores and thereby end poverty.

And as mentioned above, this kind of data collection dovetails nicely with the goals of folks who dream of massive data collection (the kind of all-encompassing data collection that adults would be more reluctant to put up with, but if we can just get kids to accept that "sharing your data" is a fact of life...). 

That, of course, points to the big problem with this sort of operation. Data is the new gold, and what we get are a whole bunch of companies saying, "I would like to collect a bunch of your gold, but don't worry, I'll keep it safely stored in this unlocked desk drawer." Then before you know it, you're reading about how huge investment firm Blackstone has bought Ancestry.com and its vast stores of genetic information. Probably just because they have a keen interest in genealogy.

The surveillance industry didn't take a nap when Covid hit-- in fact, they had a golden opportunity to pitch "Now that all your students are on devices for school, this is the perfect time to install our creepy safety surveillance software." And I'm not even touching on the data-sucking maw that is the product of various outfits like Google that are oh-so-eager to help out with education.

When they get access to computer tech, students need to understand that nothing is private and everything is forever. It would be nice if their responsible adults understood that as well. It's no small thing to sign away the privacy rights of an entire generation, even if it is "for their own good."