Imagine your search terms, key-strokes, private chats and photographs are being monitored every time they are sent. Millions of students across the country don’t have to imagine this deep surveillance of their most private communications: it’s a reality that comes with their school districts’ decision to install AI-powered monitoring software such as Gaggle and GoGuardian on students’ school-issued machines and accounts. As we demonstrated with our own Red Flag Machine, however, this software flags and blocks websites for spurious reasons and often disproportionately targets disadvantaged, minority and LGBTQ youth.

The companies making the software claim it’s all done for the sake of student safety: preventing self-harm, suicide, violence, and drug and alcohol abuse. While a noble goal, given that suicide is the second highest cause of death among American youth 10-14 years old, no comprehensive or independent studies have shown an increase in student safety linked to the usage of this software. Quite to the contrary: a recent comprehensive RAND research study shows that such AI monitoring software may cause more harm than good.

That study also found that how to respond to alerts is left to the discretion of the school districts themselves. Due to a lack of resources to deal with mental health, schools often refer these alerts to law enforcement officers who are not trained and ill-equipped to deal with youth mental crises. When police respond to youth who are having such episodes, the resulting encounters can lead to disastrous results. So why are schools still using the software–when a congressional investigation found a need for “federal action to protect students’ civil rights, safety, and privacy”? Why are they trading in their students’ privacy for a dubious-at-best marketing claim of safety?

Experts suggest it's because these supposed technical solutions are easier to implement than the effective social measures that schools often lack resources to implement. I spoke with Isabelle Barbour, a public health consultant who has experience working with schools to implement mental health supports. She pointed out that there are considerable barriers to families, kids, and youth accessing health care and mental health supports at a community level. There is also a lack of investment in supporting schools to effectively address student health and well-being. This leads to a situation where many students come to school with needs that have been unmet and these needs impact the ability of students to learn. Although there are clear and proven measures that work to address the burdens youth face, schools often need support (time, mental health expertise, community partners, and a budget) to implement these measures. Edtech companies market largely unproven plug-and-play products to educational professionals who are stretched thin and seeking a path forward to help kids. Is it any wonder why schools sign contracts which are easy to point to when questioned about what they are doing with regard to the youth mental health epidemic?

One example: Gaggle in marketing to school districts claims to have saved 5,790 student lives between 2018 and 2023, according to shaky metrics they themselves designed. All the while they keep the inner-workings of their AI monitoring secret, making it difficult for outsiders to scrutinize and measure its effectiveness.

We give Gaggle an “F”

Reports of the errors and inability of the AI flagging to understand context keep popping up. When the Lawrence, Kansas school district signed a $162,000 contract with Gaggle, no one batted an eye: It joined a growing number of school districts (currently ~1,500) nation-wide using the software. Then, school administrators called in nearly an entire class to explain photographs Gaggle’s AI had labeled as “nudity” because the software wouldn’t tell them:

“Yet all students involved maintain that none of their photos had nudity in them. Some were even able to determine which images were deleted by comparing backup storage systems to what remained on their school accounts. Still, the photos were deleted from school accounts, so there is no way to verify what Gaggle detected. Even school administrators can’t see the images it flags.”

Young journalists within the school district raised concerns about how Gaggle’s surveillance of students impacted their privacy and free speech rights. As journalist Max McCoy points out in his article for the Kansas Reflector, “newsgathering is a constitutionally protected activity and those in authority shouldn’t have access to a journalist’s notes, photos and other unpublished work.” Despite having renewed Gaggle’s contract, the district removed the surveillance software from the devices of student journalists. Here, a successful awareness campaign resulted in a tangible win for some of the students affected. While ad-hoc protections for journalists are helpful, more is needed to honor all students' fundamental right to privacy against this new front of technological invasions.

Tips for Students to Reclaim their Privacy

Students struggling with the invasiveness of school surveillance AI may find some reprieve by taking measures and forming habits to avoid monitoring. Some considerations:

• Consider any school-issued device a spying tool. 
• Don’t try to hack or remove the monitoring software unless specifically allowed by your school: it may result in significant consequences from your school or law enforcement. 
• Instead, turn school-issued devices completely off when they aren’t being used, especially while at home. This will prevent the devices from activating the camera, microphone, and surveillance software.
• If not needed, consider leaving school-issued devices in your school locker: this will avoid depending on these devices to log in to personal accounts, which will keep data from those accounts safe from prying eyes.
• Don’t log in to personal accounts on a school-issued device (if you can avoid it - we understand sometimes a school-issued device is the only computer some students have access to). Rather, use a personal device for all personal communications and accounts (e.g., email, social media). Maybe your personal phone is the only device you have to log in to social media and chat with friends. That’s okay: keeping separate devices for separate purposes will reduce the risk that your data is leaked or surveilled. 
• Don’t log in to school-controlled accounts or apps on your personal device: that can be monitored, too. 
• Instead, create another email address on a service the school doesn’t control which is just for personal communications. Tell your friends to contact you on that email outside of school.

Finally, voice your concern and discomfort with such software being installed on devices you rely on. There are plenty of resources to point to, many linked to in this post, when raising concerns about these technologies. As the young journalists at Lawrence High School have shown, writing about it can be an effective avenue to bring up these issues with school administrators. At the very least, it will send a signal to those in charge that students are uncomfortable trading their right to privacy for an elusive promise of security.

Schools Can Do Better to Protect Students Safety and Privacy

It’s not only the students who are concerned about AI spying in the classroom and beyond. Parents are often unaware of the spyware deployed on school-issued laptops their children bring home. And when using a privately-owned shared computer logged into a school-issued Google Workspace or Microsoft account, a parent’s web search will be available to the monitoring AI as well.

New studies have uncovered some of the mental detriments that surveillance causes. Despite this and the array of First Amendment questions these student surveillance technologies raise, schools have rushed to adopt these unproven and invasive technologies. As Barbour put it: 

“While ballooning class sizes and the elimination of school positions are considerable challenges, we know that a positive school climate helps kids feel safe and supported. This allows kids to talk about what they need with caring adults. Adults can then work with others to identify supports. This type of environment helps not only kids who are suffering with mental health problems, it helps everyone.”

We urge schools to focus on creating that environment, rather than subjecting students to ever-increasing scrutiny through school surveillance AI.

1999年、東ティモールの人々はレファレンダム（国連人民投票）で独立を選び、25周年目を迎えました。　1999年、西サハラの人々もレファレンダム（国連人民投票）を予定していましたが、モロッコの反対で頓挫したままです。　東ティモールは、元ポルトガル首相で国連事務総長のアントニオ。グテーレスと、今もレファレンダム（国連人民投票）を待つ西サハラ代表のブラヒム・ガリを、第25回民族自決権国連人民投票式典に招待し、会わせました。

"In total, Frontex spent roughly €275 million in pilot projects from 2014 to 2022 to research new technologies, many of them related to drones, Yasha Maccanico, a researcher at non-profit Statewatch and the University of Bristol, told Euractiv. 

(...)

For Maccanico, the increased spending on drones for “situational awareness” in “pre-frontier areas,” essentially means that Frontex will be able to identify vessels earlier, and closer to third-country borders, with patchy human rights records – such as Libya or Tunisia, and therefore push EU borders further back. 

Using more drones for surveillance means fewer European coastguards and Frontex vessels will be needed at sea. With fewer EU vessels, there is a greater chance that a non-EU country will respond to migrant boats, removing the obligation for EU responders to bring them ashore, said Maccanico."

Full story here.

Being out in the world advocating for privacy often means having to face a chorus of naysayers and nihilists. When we spend time fighting the expansion of Automated License Plate Readers capable of tracking cars as they move, or the growing ubiquity of both public and private surveillance cameras, we often hear a familiar refrain: “you don’t have an expectation of privacy in public.” This is not true. In the United States, you do have some expectation of privacy—even in public—and it’s important to stand up and protect that right.

How is it possible to have an expectation of privacy in public? The answer lies in the rise of increasingly advanced surveillance technology. When you are out in the world, of course you are going to be seen, so your presence will be recorded in one way or another. There’s nothing stopping a person from observing you if they’re standing across the street. If law enforcement has decided to investigate you, they can physically follow you. If you go to the bank or visit a courthouse, it’s reasonable to assume you’ll end up on their individual video security system.

But our ever-growing network of sophisticated surveillance technology has fundamentally transformed what it means to be observed in public. Today’s technology can effortlessly track your location over time, collect sensitive, intimate information about you, and keep a retrospective record of this data that may be stored for months, years, or indefinitely. This data can be collected for any purpose, or even for none at all. And taken in the aggregate, this data can paint a detailed picture of your daily life—a picture that is more cheaply and easily accessed by the government than ever before.

Because of this, we’re at risk of exposing more information about ourselves in public than we were in decades past. This, in turn, affects how we think about privacy in public. While your expectation of privacy is certainly different in public than it would be in your private home, there is no legal rule that says you lose all expectation of privacy whenever you’re in a public place. To the contrary, the U.S. Supreme Court has emphasized since the 1960’s that “what [one] seeks to preserve as private, even in an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected.” The Fourth Amendment protects “people, not places.”  U.S. privacy law instead typically asks whether your expectation of privacy is something society considers “reasonable.”

This is where mass surveillance comes in. While it is unreasonable to assume that everything you do in public will be kept private from prying eyes, there is a real expectation that when you travel throughout town over the course of a day—running errands, seeing a doctor, going to or from work, attending a protest—that the entirety of your movements is not being precisely tracked, stored by a single entity, and freely shared with the government. In other words, you have a reasonable expectation of privacy in at least some of the uniquely sensitive and revealing information collected by surveillance technology, although courts and legislatures are still working out the precise contours of what that includes.

In 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court decided a landmark case on this subject, Carpenter v. United States. In Carpenter, the court recognized that you have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the whole of your physical movements, including your movements in public. It therefore held that the defendant had an expectation of privacy in 127 days worth of accumulated historical cell site location information (CSLI). The records that make up CSLI data can provide a comprehensive chronicle of your movements over an extended period of time by using the cell site location information from your phone.  Accessing this information intrudes on your private sphere, and the Fourth Amendment ordinarily requires the government to obtain a warrant in order to do so.

Importantly, you retain this expectation of privacy even when those records are collected while you’re in public. In coming to its holding, the Carpenter court wished to preserve “the degree of privacy against government that existed when the Fourth Amendment was adopted.” Historically, we have not expected the government to secretly catalogue and monitor all of our movements over time, even when we travel in public. Allowing the government to access cell site location information contravenes that expectation. The court stressed that these accumulated records reveal not only a person’s particular public movements, but also their “familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations.”

As Chief Justice John Roberts said in the majority opinion:

“Given the unique nature of cell phone location records, the fact that the information is held by a third party does not by itself overcome the user’s claim to Fourth Amendment protection. Whether the Government employs its own surveillance technology . . . or leverages the technology of a wireless carrier, we hold that an individual maintains a legitimate expectation of privacy in the record of his physical movements as captured through [cell phone site data]. The location information obtained from Carpenter’s wireless carriers was the product of a search. . . .

As with GPS information, the time-stamped data provides an intimate window into a person’s life, revealing not only his particular movements, but through them his “familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations.” These location records “hold for many Americans the ‘privacies of life.’” . . .  A cell phone faithfully follows its owner beyond public thoroughfares and into private residences, doctor’s offices, political headquarters, and other potentially revealing locales. Accordingly, when the Government tracks the location of a cell phone it achieves near perfect surveillance, as if it had attached an ankle monitor to the phone’s user.”

As often happens in the wake of a landmark Supreme Court decision, there has been some confusion among lower courts in trying to determine what other types of data and technology violate our expectation of privacy when we’re in public. There are admittedly still several open questions: How comprehensive must the surveillance be? How long of a time period must it cover? Do we only care about backward-looking, retrospective tracking? Still, one overall principle remains certain: you do have some expectation of privacy in public.

If law enforcement or the government wants to know where you’ve been all day long over an extended period of time, that combined information is considered revealing and sensitive enough that police need a warrant for it. We strongly believe the same principle also applies to other forms of surveillance technology, such as automated license plate reader camera networks that capture your car’s movements over time. As more and more integrated surveillance technologies become the norm, we expect courts will expand existing legal decisions to protect this expectation of privacy.

It's crucial that we do not simply give up on this right. Your location over time, even if you are traversing public roads and public sidewalks, is revealing. More revealing than many people realize. If you drive from a specific person’s house to a protest, and then back to that house afterward—what can police infer from having those sensitive and chronologically expansive records of your movement? What could people insinuate about you if you went to a doctor’s appointment at a reproductive healthcare clinic and then drove to a pharmacy three towns away from where you live? Scenarios like this involve people driving on public roads or being seen in public, but we also have to take time into consideration. Tracking someone’s movements all day is not nearly the same thing as seeing their car drive past a single camera at one time and location.

The courts may still be catching up with the law and technology, but that doesn’t mean it’s a surveillance free-for-all just because you’re in the public. The government still has important restrictions against tracking our movement over time and in public even if you find yourself out in the world walking past individual security cameras. This is why we do what we do, because despite the naysayers, someone has to continue to hold the line and educate the world on how privacy isn’t dead.

　　　　　　　　　　　　　 　　　　　　　　　　　　映画「山里は持続可能な世界だった」製作委員会　高度経済成長以前の農山村の暮らしから現代に生きる私たちが学ぶべきことを提示してくれる。タイトルが「世界だった」と過去形になっているが、決して当時を懐かしむのではなく、これからの社会の構築に必要な価値観を描き出そうと、伝統的林業、炭焼きや養蚕、原木椎茸栽培や鍛冶屋など、かつての生業を受け継いでいる人々を取材し、効率重視の現代的価値観に抗う新たなライフスタイルを模索する。　原村政樹監..

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