Some schools and organizations are abandoning exam monitoring software made by Proctorio amid a barrage of complaints from students over privacy
Todd Feathers / VICE : Tweets: @motherboard , @fightfortheftr , @eff , @zenalbatross , and @hypervisible Tweets: @motherboard : Proctorio has cashed in on remote learning since the start of the pandemic. Now, some schools are abandoning the company's controversial software. https://www.vice.com/... @fightfortheftr : In which @proctorio outright LIES to @motherboard about misrepresenting who its clients are on its website. 😂 #DumpsterFire https://www.vice.com/... @eff : Thanks to efforts of students, activists, and educators, schools are ending their partnerships with invasive and discriminatory remote proctoring companies. You love to see it. https://www.vice.com/... Janus Rose / @zenalbatross : last year, we started reporting on Proctorio and other invasive school surveillance software that cropped up during the pandemic. now, many schools are dropping the software after a nationwide backlash from students and teachers https://www.vice.com/... @hypervisible : “We have to have these acts of refusal to use ed tech that harms students...” ✊🏿✊🏿 ✊🏿 https://www.vice.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Proctorio rode pandemic-era remote learning to explosive growth — its client list grew over 500% from 2019 to 2021 even as it drew complaints, lawsuits, and accusations of bias and pushback from top universities. The software itself is invasive by design: facial detection, eye tracking, mouse-click logging, and full room scans flag students for behavior that may be entirely innocent.
What changed with this story is that the backlash started converting into lost contracts: schools and organizations are abandoning Proctorio outright, with advocacy groups like EFF and Fight for the Future amplifying student campaigns — and VICE reporting that Proctorio misrepresented who its clients are on its own website.
First-order effects
- Schools and organizations canceling Proctorio contracts lose exam surveillance coverage immediately and must either revert to in-person or honor-system testing or find a replacement vendor mid-semester.
- Proctorio now fights on two fronts at once: churn among existing clients and a public credibility problem, after VICE reported the company lied about misrepresenting its client list.
Second-order effects
- Rival proctoring vendors inherit both the demand and the scrutiny — Examity faced the same invasion-of-privacy complaints during early pandemic adoption, so displaced Proctorio customers have no clean alternative.
- The documented technical failures raise the bar for every vendor: an [[a:965112|OpenCV-based facial recognition model used by Proctorio fails to recognize Black faces more than 50% of the time]], making bias testing a de facto procurement requirement across the category.
Third-order effects
- If abandonment spreads, the industry's growth model — selling surveillance as pandemic infrastructure — gives way to one where vendors must survive independent audits of accuracy and bias, a shift the broader edtech-spyware pattern has been building toward since student-device spyware was marketed without any supporting research.
- Student-led campaigns backed by national advocacy groups establish a repeatable playbook: organized complaints plus documented algorithmic bias can unwind enterprise edtech contracts faster than formal regulation.
The trend: Remote exam proctoring is moving from unchecked pandemic windfall toward contested procurement, where documented bias and privacy failures determine which surveillance vendors schools keep.