By Iminza Keboge
Published July 19, 2022
An overwhelming majority of education technology (EdTech) products endorsed by 49 governments of the world’s most populous countries appear to have surveilled or had the capacity to surveil children.
According to Human Rights Watch, 145 Of the 163 products reviewed surveilled or had the capacity to surveil children, outside school hours, and deep into their private lives. Many products were found to harvest information about children such as who they are, where they are, what they do in the classroom, who their family and friends are, and what kind of device their families could afford for them to use for online learning.
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“Children, parents, and teachers were largely kept in the dark about the data surveillance practices we uncovered in children’s online classrooms,” says Hye Jung Han, children’s rights and technology researcher and advocate at Human Rights Watch. “By understanding how these online learning tools handled their child’s privacy, people can more effectively demand protection for children online.”
Few governments checked whether the EdTech products they rapidly endorsed during the Covid-19 pandemic were safe for children to use. Of the 42 governments that provided online education to children by building and offering their own EdTech products for use, 39 governments made products that handled children’s personal data in ways that risked or infringed on their rights.
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The data surveillance took place in educational settings where children could not reasonably object to such surveillance. Most companies did not allow students to decline to be tracked, and most of this monitoring happened secretly, without the child or their family’s knowledge or consent. In most instances, it was impossible for children to opt out of such surveillance without giving up on their formal education during the pandemic.
“Children are priceless, not products,” Han said. “Governments should adopt and enforce modern child data protection laws to stop the surveillance of children by actors who don’t have children’s best interests at heart.”
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