An article by Lois Beckett in The Guardian provides a good overview of the state of surveillance of students in US schools. The articles describes the rise in the surveillance of communications on school-provided email and online systems in the wake of the many school shootings that have plagued US schools. A new aspect of the surveillance regimes is the application of automation technologies that make it fast and relatively easy to scan student communications and respond in minutes to any problems.
Among the problems being flagged by these automated surveillance processes are student communications related to doing harm to themselves or others as well as student searches of topics deemed as related to “inappropriate” behavior or content. The monitoring services are provided to school districts by a number of companies with school spending on these services apparently doubling from 2013 to 2018.
Although most of the monitoring services are being applied to email and other applications provided by schools, at least some of the surveillance service providers offer more comprehensive monitoring services to parents. Parents appear to be comfortable subjecting their children to online monitoring.
Throughout the article there are cautions about the impact of the monitoring practices on student privacy, but the prospect of preventing student harm via monitoring of school online systems seems to override such concerns.
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