“How Dare They Peep into My Private Life?”

Human Rights Watch

Children’s Rights Violations by Governments that Endorsed Online Learning During the Covid-19 Pandemic.

On school days, 9-year-old Rodin wakes up every morning at 8 a.m. in Istanbul, Turkey. (...) By 9 a.m., he logs into class and waves hello to his teacher and to his classmates. (...)

Unbeknownst to him, an invisible swarm of tracking technologies surveil Rodin’s online interactions throughout his day. Within milliseconds of Rodin logging into class in the morning, his school’s online learning platform begins tracking Rodin’s physical location—at home in his family’s living room, where he has spent most of his days during the pandemic lockdown. The virtual whiteboard passes along information about his doodling habits to advertising technology (AdTech) and other companies; when Rodin’s math class is over, trackers follow him outside of his virtual classroom and to the different apps and sites he visits across the internet. The social media platform Rodin uses to post his homework silently accesses his phone’s contact list and downloads personal details about his family and friends. Sophisticated algorithms review this trove of data, enough to piece together an intimate portrait of Rodin in order to figure out how he might be easily influenced. (...)

This report is a global investigation of the education technology (EdTech) endorsed by 49 governments for children’s education during the pandemic. Based on technical and policy analysis of 164 EdTech products, Human Rights Watch finds that governments’ endorsements of the majority of these online learning platforms put at risk or directly violated children’s privacy and other children’s rights, for purposes unrelated to their education. (...)

Most online learning platforms installed tracking technologies that trailed children outside of their virtual classrooms and across the internet, over time. (...)

Children are surveilled at dizzying scale in their online classrooms. Human Rights Watch observed 146 EdTech products directly sending or granting access to children’s personal data to 196 third-party companies, overwhelmingly AdTech. (...)

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Tags: #education #school #online_learning #tracking #trackers #tracking_technology #adtech #edtech #privacy #data #data_mining #profiling #profile #children #personal_data #surveillance_capitalism