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: @dangillmor and @aclu Tweets: Dan Gillmor / @dangillmor : Kids are getting educated about at least one thing in America: They're living in a surveillance state. https://www.wired.com/... @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/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This story closes a loop opened years earlier: reporting in 2019 found schools adopting student surveillance with little regard for effectiveness or privacy, including spyware on student devices sold as a way to prevent shootings despite no independent research backing those claims. What changed since then is scale — the pandemic pushed districts into bulk device purchases during a shortage of low-cost Chromebooks, so the machines carrying monitoring software are now often the only computer a household has.
That supply chain detail is what gives the equity angle its teeth: families who could not buy their own hardware received district laptops pre-loaded with monitoring agents, making surveillance a condition of access rather than an opt-in. Commentators like Dan Gillmor and the ACLU are framing it as children learning they live in a surveillance state — a through-line back to the earlier social-media monitoring adoption covered by Education Week.
First-order effects
- Low-income students and students of color who depend on school-issued laptops face monitoring on their primary computing device, while wealthier peers on personal hardware largely escape it.
- As the ACLU's statement frames it, families unable to afford their own devices must choose between accepting surveillance and accessing education.
Second-order effects
- Vendors selling activity monitoring to schools — the category Bloomberg examined in GoGuardian's lockdown-era surge — gain entrenched distribution through district procurement, giving them leverage over renewals and expansion into more grade levels.
- Districts that bought cheap Chromebooks en masse during the shortage have effectively bundled a vendor's software with every device deployed, turning a one-time hardware purchase into a recurring monitoring relationship.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, device provision itself becomes a surveillance vector: whoever supplies the laptop controls what is observed, which pushes the policy question toward regulators and school boards rather than parents choosing apps.
- The unresolved question from the earlier reporting — whether these tools do anything for safety at all — becomes harder to audit once monitoring is embedded in the default device fleet, entrenching spending justified by unproven claims.
The trend: Student monitoring is consolidating from ad hoc tools into infrastructure embedded in school-supplied hardware, converting the digital divide into a surveillance divide along income lines.