Pupils’ data harvested by Whitehall-backed tech firm

AN ONLINE learning tool recommended by the Government to schools for use during the pandemic harvested thousands of pupils’ data, The Daily Telegraph can reveal.

Edpuzzle, a video quiz website and app aimed at children as young as five, monitored pupils while they were using it for their education. The technology, which was used by more than 1,000 schools in Britain at the start of this year, has been criticised for failing to make it explicitly clear that it collected the data – which included the activity of their mouse and their keyboard.

Edpuzzle was recommended by the Department for Education (DFE) during the pandemic when online learning was compulsory for schoolchildren.

It allows teachers to add quiz questions to online videos and use pupils’ answers to monitor their progress.

The company confirmed that pupils were monitored when they used the technology and that some third parties had access to the information held.

However, it insisted that the data had only been used for Edpuzzle’s own business purposes and that the information had not been sold to third parties.

The company is now facing calls to delete any children’s data.

Chi Onwurah, Labour’s shadow minister for digital, culture, media and sport, said: “Both parents and children should have rights when it comes to the collection and storage of children’s data.

“If it has been collected without the permission of parents and children it should be deleted.”

The disclosure that children’s data was gathered will fuel fears about transparency and whether the Government failed to carry out checks before endorsing companies.

The revelation is part of an investigation by Human Rights Watch (HRW), into the scale of child surveillance by online programmes when schools were forced to shut due to Covid. The Telegraph and 12 other media groups in The Signals Network got exclusive access to HRW’S “Edtech Exposed” study which analysed 164 products in 49 countries.

Edpuzzle said none of its actions violate its privacy policy “which we’ve laid out in clear, simple language in order to be accessible to all”.

It denied using some of the industry’s most invasive key logging tools, but said it “does check keys pressed for accessibility reasons”.