Surveillance at School

In this report, the authors provided some of the following recommendations: (1) Parents, teachers, and administrators--as individuals and through their organizations--work to make public the threats that branded programs and materials, as well as unregulated digital technologies, pose to children when they are allowed into schools and classrooms; (2) The Federal Trade Commission extend the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) protections to age 14 and strengthen the protections offered to adolescents ages 15-18; (3) Industry self-regulation not be relied upon to protect the interests of students. Instead, policymakers should adopt enforceable legislation that holds schools, districts, and companies with access to student data accountable for violations of student privacy; (4) Legislators carefully review proposed legislative language to ensure that it does not contain loopholes that provide companies with opportunities to collect and exploit children's data while also "following the letter of the law".

Welner, K., Hinchey, P., Mathis, W., & Molnar, A. (2016). Learning to be watched: Surveillance culture at school – The eighteenth annual report on schoolhouse commercializing trends, 2014-2015. Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED574730.pdf