One student in Washington state asked a search engine, “Why does my boyfriend hit me?” Another threatened suicide in an email to an unrequited love. A gay teen opened up in an online diary about struggles with homophobic parents, writing they just wanted to be themselves. In each case, A1-powered surveillance software public school officials. Though the software’s goal was to keep children safe, the tools raise serious questions about privacy and security — as proven when Seattle Times and Associated Press reporters inadvertently received access to almost 3,500 sensitive, unredacted student documents through a records request about the district’s surveillance technology. It’s “a stark reminder of surveillance technology’s unintended consequences in American schools,” the Associated Press reports as part of its investigation with The Education Reporting Collaborative, a coalition of eight newsrooms.
Roughly 1,500 school districts nationwide use Gaggle Safety Management’s software to track the online activity of approximately 6 million students. The technology has been in high demand since the pandemic, when nearly every child received a school-issued tablet or laptop. But in some cases, the collaborative’s investigation found, technology has outed LGBTQ+ children and eroded trust between students and school staff, while failing to keep schools completely safe. And there’s no independent research showing it measurably lowers student suicide rates or reduces violence. A 2023 RAND study found only “scant evidence” of either benefits or risks from AI surveillance, concluding: “No research to date has comprehensively examined how these programs affect youth suicide prevention.”
Members of The Education Collaborative are AL.com, The Associated Press, The Christian Science Monitor, The Dallas Morning News, The Hechinger Report, Idaho Education News, The Post and Courier in South Carolina, and The Seattle Times.
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