Study: 60% of 73 K-12 apps from 38 schools in 14 states across the US send student data to a variety of third parties, roughly 50% to Google and 14% to Facebook
The COVID-19 pandemic has pushed schools around the country to adopt and rely heavily on new technology.
Context & Ripple Effects
This study lands mid-arc in a string of audits of what pandemic-era classroom tech does with children's data. Earlier reporting had already flagged the breadth of the problem: school apps tracking students from the classroom to the bathroom in 2019, then [[a:1158059|Human Rights Watch finding 89% of 164 remote-learning tools across 49 countries sharing student data]] with marketers and brokers a year after this study.
What this report adds is concentration at the top: of 73 apps used by 38 schools in 14 states, roughly half route student data to Google and 14% to Facebook — meaning two ad-funded platforms are the default destination for a large share of K-12 data flows, not a long tail of obscure trackers.
First-order effects
- Schools in the 38 surveyed districts learn their approved app stacks are shipping student information onward by default — procurement decisions made during the COVID-19 push to adopt technology now carry a documented privacy exposure.
Second-order effects
- Google and Facebook face pointed questions about their role as the dominant recipients, since the finding ties their consumer ad businesses directly to schoolchildren's data rather than to anonymous developers' choices.
Third-order effects
- The accumulating evidence base — this study, the HRW audit, and Pixalate's finding that most popular children's apps send location data to the ad industry — builds toward regulatory and district-level requirements that edtech contracts specify where student data goes, shifting liability onto vendors.
The trend: Independent audits keep converging on the same finding — children's education software is structurally wired into the ad-tech ecosystem — making student data flows a recurring trigger for privacy regulation.