Laptops that US schools issued to students for remote learning are likely to have monitoring software, disproportionately affecting low-income students and PoC
Sidney Fussell / Wired : Tweets: @aclu and @pardesoteric Tweets: @aclu : Surveillance on school-issued devices forces children and families who can't afford their own devices to choose between their privacy and their education. It's yet another consequence of the ever-widening digital divide. https://www.wired.com/... Arielle Pardes / @pardesoteric : This is absolutely wild: Laptops that lower-income kids borrowed from their school districts during the pandemic often had spyware installed on them. From @sidneyfussell: https://www.wired.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Student-device monitoring predates the pandemic: as spyware marketed as a school-shooting prevention tool spread through US districts in 2019 with no independent research behind it, schools were also hastily adopting social media monitoring programs with little regard for privacy. The pandemic then scaled the hardware: when remote learning hit, a shortage of low-cost Chromebooks left low-income families dependent on whatever devices districts could procure.
Wired's Sidney Fussell connects those threads: the laptops districts issued during the shortage are likely to carry monitoring software, so the students who could not afford their own devices are the ones who must accept surveillance to attend class at all — as the ACLU put it, a choice between privacy and education.
First-order effects
- Students and families who borrowed pandemic-era district laptops face monitoring on the devices their schooling now runs through, while classmates with personal hardware can keep school activity off surveilled machines.
Second-order effects
- Vendors like GoGuardian, whose usage exploded during lockdowns and which some say adds to kids' psychological strain, are positioned to convert emergency device deployments into standing contracts as districts keep the laptops in circulation.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, US schools institutionalize a two-tier privacy system in which the ability to opt out of monitoring tracks family income — and the safety rationale, never independently validated per the earlier spyware coverage, becomes the default justification for always-on student surveillance.
The trend: Emergency remote-learning tooling is hardening into permanent school surveillance infrastructure, with the burden falling on the students least able to supply their own devices.