Surveilling school children: Digital privacy & education

Join us to hear about research into the use of highly intrusive monitoring technologies in children’s lives at school, after school, and beyond the school gates. Hear what you can do to help the campaign to make all school data safe, fair and transparent.

The creeping capability of commercial school safeguarding software now includes imposed surveillance at home. Companies that once offered only filtering and blocking now monitor individuals on screen content and searches. Typing words that match keywords libraries of thousands of terms can trigger a risk flag.

Advancing technology enables ever more one-sided opaque access to information about children, building profiles, even taking their photos via the webcam.

But there is no discussion of its growing risks or transparency to schools or families about how it works.

defenddigitalme has obtained statistics using Freedom of Information requests that suggest 70% of schools in England use web monitoring software, and a growing trend to monitor personal devices beyond the school playground.

Parents want to know how these flags and watchwords are being used about their children. Under a third of parents polled believe their school use these tools. None of the 400 school policies reviewed by defenddigitalme explain it.

Will the Online Harms agenda normalise or even seek to legalise this gross invasion of private and family life?

Speaker:

Jen Persson - defend digital me

Background info:

https://defenddigitalme.com/2018/12/response-to-school-pupils-being-spied-on-through-webcams-and-school-web-monitoring-software/