Human Rights Watch finds 89% of 164 remote learning apps and sites used during the pandemic in 49 countries shared student data with marketers and data brokers
Washington PostDrew Harwell
Context & Ripple Effects
The finding broadens an earlier U.S. sample in which K–12 apps sent student data to third parties, including Google and Facebook. It places pandemic-era education technology within a wider cross-country data-sharing pattern rather than treating school use as a protected exception.
Related coverage also documented GoGuardian's lockdown-era expansion in U.S. schools, alongside concerns about the strain of student monitoring. Human Rights Watch's report shifts attention from surveillance inside school systems to the commercial recipients of data collected through learning tools.
First-order effects
Operators of the 164 remote-learning apps and sites are exposed to scrutiny over data flows from students to marketers and data brokers.
Marketers and data brokers receiving information through education tools face a more visible link between their data supply and pandemic-era student use.
Second-order effects
The report reinforces the pattern in which child-focused apps have sent location data to the ad industry, as documented in the Pixalate child-app study, making education technology part of a broader youth-data advertising concern.
Schools and education-technology buyers evaluating remote-learning tools must account for third-party data sharing as well as the monitoring functions already associated with school-issued devices.
Third-order effects
If education buyers begin treating third-party sharing as a procurement constraint, learning platforms will face pressure to separate core instructional services from advertising and broker data flows.
The combined record of app tracking and school-device monitoring points toward student-data governance becoming a distinct layer of education-technology oversight, rather than a feature-level privacy issue.
The trend: Pandemic-driven education technology is exposing how student access, monitoring, and advertising-data collection can become intertwined across the school software stack.
Unsurprisingly, remote learning tools are just another form of spyware for adtech companies. Any school districts who mandated these tools on kids should be held liable https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ...
And let me tell you, my kids' schools got PISSY when I said I needed to know what was on my network and wouldn't allow certain things. 'Course, I also had to keep fixing things until I said I'd start charging them for tech support. https://twitter.com/...
“To understand how websites handle children's data, @hrw used Blacklight, a real-time website privacy inspector.” Findings like these are exactly why we built this tool. We're glad it could contribute. https://twitter.com/...
Exploitation of kids and students via collection, use and sale of their data should be banned by Congress. COPPA isn't enough. Education should not be a marketing opportunity. https://twitter.com/...
In the rush to connect kids to virtual classrooms during the Covid-19 pandemic, many governments failed to check that their education technology recommendations were safe. The result: Children are being surveilled. New report from Human Rights Watch: https://www.hrw.org/... https…
1/2 It should be noted that the WaPo does the exact same thing to you, whatever your age may be. In the next tweet is a list of the trackers and brokers you are exposed to when you visit Remote learning apps tracked kids for ads - The Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.co…
“The conversation the industry wants us to have is: What's the harm?” ."The right conversation, the ethical conversation is: What's the need? Why does a fourth-grader need to be tracked by a third-party vendor to learn math?" https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ...
Today, @hrw is releasing a report that finds an overwhelming majority of online learning products endorsed by 49 of the world's most populous countries during Covid-19 school closure were risky for children to use. https://www.hrw.org/...
Children shouldn't be compelled to give up their privacy to learn. It's time governments passed modern child data protection laws that regulate the collection, processing & use of children's data. #StudentsNotProducts https://twitter.com/...
Many of these products monitored children, & harvested personal data — for example, who & where they are, or what they do in class, or who their family & friends are, or what kind of device their families could afford for them to use. #StudentsNotProducts https://www.hrw.org/...
“Children,” lead researcher Hye Jung Han wrote, were “just as likely to be surveilled in their virtual classrooms as adults shopping in the world's largest virtual malls.” - #NowReading @techchildrights for @hrw https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ...
A blockbuster new report by Human Rights Watch found that learning tools for children—often endorsed or recommended by governments around the world—are injecting kids into a surveillance advertising & tracking ecosystem with no meaningful way to opt out. https://www.hrw.org/...