Children couldn’t learn during COVID without surveillance
The coronavirus flung 1.6 billion children and young adults around the world out of the classroom and into the realm of digital learning — which, for the advertising industry, meant 1.6 billion new sources of sensitive data.
A new report from Human Rights Watch reveals the startling extent to which the educational tools students used during the pandemic collected and shared their information. The analysis of 164 apps and websites recommended by school districts here and governments elsewhere discovered that almost 90% of the products vacuumed up students’ activities, locations and even sometimes their keystrokes, passing this trove of knowledge on to firms that exploit them for profit. Many of these privacy violations were invisible; many were also impossible to avoid for any kid who wanted, amid the outbreak of a deadly disease, to continue learning. The 146 products that sold or granted access to data did so to 196 third-party companies; to whom or to how many those third-party companies then passed along the data is unknown.
These findings show how the globe has settled on a default position of constant surveillance. The harm this status quo causes varies: Most grievously, the detailed picture that this data allows brokers to develop could, for example, aid an abuser or trafficker in tracking down a victim; more mundane is the annoyance of being followed by the image of a pair of shoes an advertising algorithm has decided you can be enticed into buying. The lack of restrictions in the United States and many other places on the gathering, processing and selling of personal information means that companies rarely have to distinguish between these uses, or protect customers against the worst of them. And even when it comes to the mildest of outcomes, it’s worth asking the question: Is it necessary, and is it right, to amass this data on children when they and their parents do not expect it and have no ability to prevent it?
The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act already has special restrictions on data collected from young children, which the companies implicated in last week’s report say they haven’t violated. The Federal Trade Commission voted this month on a policy statement to enforce the law more vigorously, and there’s movement on Capitol Hill to strengthen it. These efforts are obviously in order, but the fact that even kids trying to learn amid a pandemic are monitored so that someone, somewhere can make some money points to a societal problem. The solution is a comprehensive federal privacy law that applies to everyone. Sens. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., and Roger Wicker, R-Miss., whose Commerce Committee has long been working on a bipartisan bill, should overcome their remaining differences to complete the job.