When it premiered last month, the Amazon docuseries Spy High reminded Americans how, in 2009, Pennsylvania’s Lower Merion school district remotely activated its school-issued laptop webcams to capture 56,000 pictures of students outside of school, including in their bedrooms. There are few places where the use of student surveillancetechnologyfeels more threatening than in the room where children undress, sleep and engage in other private conduct, and that is why the intrusions featured in Spy High are so disturbing.
Fortunately, in the 16 years since Lower Merion’s misconduct was revealed, we have not seen another webcam-based privacy violation of a similar scale. But as the parent of two public school students, I take little comfort in that achievement, because I know there is another, ultra-private place that schools are intruding upon virtually every minute of every day: our children’s minds.
As Spy High correctly observes, after the Covid-19 pandemic closed US schools at the dawn of this decade, student surveillance technologies were conveniently repackaged as “remote learning tools” and found their way into virtually every K-12 school, thereby supercharging the growth of the $3bn EdTech surveillance industry.
To avoid losing its Covid-19 windfall as the pandemic eased, the EdTech surveillance industry pivoted back to its original mission, claiming – without reliable evidence – that its products were a highly effective means of preventing student violence and suicide.
In reality, products by well-known EdTech surveillance vendors such as Gaggle, GoGuardian, Securly and Navigate360 review and analyze our children’s digital lives, ranging from their private texts, emails, social media posts and school documents to the keywords they search and the websites they visit. In 2025, wherever a school has access to a student’s data – whether it be through school accounts, school-provided computers or even private devices that utilize school-associated educational apps – they also have access to the way our children think, research and communicate. That means the private conversations, thoughts and mistakes today’s parents made as kids, which went unnoticed by the larger world, are now as readily accessible to schools as a student’s grades.
As schools normalize perpetual spying, today’s kids are learning that nothing they read or write electronically is private. Accordingly, kids are learning that the safest way to avoid revealing their private thoughts, and potentially subjecting themselves to discipline, may be to stop or sharply restrict their digital communications and to avoid researching unpopular or unconventional ideas altogether. As if George Orwell himself were one of their teachers, they are learning that Big Brother is indeed watching them, and that negative repercussions may result from thoughts or behaviors the government does not endorse. That is no way to raise a generation of children.
The final episode of Sky High is titled Canary in a Coal Mine, but sadly the early warning provided by Lower Merion has gone largely unheeded. Instead, US schools have continued to march straight into the mine, spending billions on student surveillance products that do not work as advertised, harm students and take resources away from more reliable interventions.
Fortunately, there are actions we can take to reverse course. For one, if the federal government is truly as interested in cutting waste as it claims, it should stop feeding the fraud by funding schools’ purchases of unproven student surveillance technologies.
And for parents, the greatest children’s advocates of all, we can act locally to guide our schools toward better decision-making. Specifically, before any student surveillance products are purchased in the name of promoting student safety, parents should insist their schools answer three basic questions.
Question one:other than the biased marketing materials provided by the EdTech surveillance companies themselves, what independent, reliable evidence do you have that their products work as advertised?
Question two:what harms might be caused to students, especially the most vulnerable ones, by the use of the surveillance product?
And question three:what alternative products and interventions are available, at a similar or lower cost, to keep our students safe?
Believe it or not, most schools who use student surveillance products never answer these questions. If parents start insisting they do so before signing any surveillance contracts, schools will be far more likely to eschew the use of these “student safety” products that, in reality, only place our kids at greater risk.
Chad Marlow is an ACLU senior policy counsel and the principal author of Digital Dystopia: The Danger in Buying What the EdTechSurveillanceIndustry Is Selling