Student Journalists Convince School To Ditch Its Spyware, But School Only Agrees To Not Spy On Its Journalists

Schools have always kept tabs on students using school-issued devices. Prior to the pandemic, this had mostly been limited to filtering software that prevents students from accessing content schools don’t approve of. Of course, this has also kept students from accessing content that might be useful to them personally (self-harm prevention, LGBTQ+ content) or scholastically (because Wikipedia is public [school] enemy #1).

Once the pandemic hit, most schools relied on remote access by students. That’s where spying on students really ramped up. Fully convinced most students would cheat on schoolwork and tests if given the chance, far more intrusive spyware was deployed — including options that provided test proctors with access to laptop cameras to ensure students were not cheating when engaging remotely with tests or other schoolwork.

Never before had schools had access to students’ living spaces. But now they have this access. And even with the end of remote learning, schools are reluctant to scale back their use of always-on tech that gives administrators access to students’ off-campus web use.

Four student journalists at Lawrence High School in Kansas have managed to convince their school to walk back some of its intrusion. Since they did all the heavy lifting, I’ll turn it over to the students: Zana Kennedy, Delaney Haase, Arabella Gipp, and Avery Sloyer.

Journalism editors asked USD 497 school board members serving on the district’s policy committee today to better protect student journalism and overall student privacy rights.

Students suggested policy changes relating to First Amendment free press protections, Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and copyright. The meeting follows a recent initiative by four editors to disband the use of Gaggle, AI-driven student surveillance software, for journalism students in USD 497. On Friday, the students also raised additional concerns about Gaggle’s broader use and said change was needed to protect students from future technology shifts.

Gaggle is as popular with schools as it is problematic. Here’s how Gaggle operates, despite what school districts and the company’s own press releases might say about its capabilities:

One associate principal I spoke to for this story says his district would receive “Questionable Content” email alerts from Gaggle about pornographic photos and profanities from students’ text messages. But the students weren’t texting on their school-issued Chromebooks. When administrators investigated, they learned that while teens were home, they would charge their phones by connecting them to their laptops via USB cables. The teens would then proceed to have what they believed to be private conversations via text, in some cases exchanging nude photos with significant others—all of which the Gaggle software running on the Chromebook could detect. Now the school advises students not to plug their personal devices into their school-issued laptops.

That’s from Wired’s April 2023 report on school spyware. By this point, most students in the nation had already returned to their schools. Very few were still engaged in remote learning, but that fact didn’t stop schools from continuing to deploy spyware first intended to be used for remote monitoring due to pandemic-related school closures.

The good news is these student journalists managed to free themselves from these intrusions by citing state laws that increased protections for students, journalists, and this particular combination of both.

Current policy already mentions many provisions of the Kansas Student Publications Act. But students sought to include references to the Kansas Shield Law as well as the federal Privacy Protection Act of 1980 — both of which protect the reporting process from government monitoring. 

Thanks to the student journalists’ tenacity, the school backed down and agreed to remove the spyware from the devices used by these students.

[T]he four seniors who led the charge — Morgan Salisbury, Maya Smith, Jack Tell and Natasha Torkzaban — refused to be quiet about it.

“I think all four of us are unapologetically loud when it comes to situations like this,” Torkzaban said.

Last week, after five months of sometimes-tense negotiations, the district agreed to remove student journalists from the surveillance program. 

And while that works out well for the student journalists, it doesn’t do much to protect the rest of the student body from spyware. Fortunately for their classmates, the journalists aren’t solely interested in ridding themselves from school-based surveillance.

[T]he journalists want assurances that the rest of the students, and future students, won’t be subjected to unwarranted intrusions.

So, now the question is why the school didn’t immediately agree to strip this malware from all school-issued devices. That’s also the question being asked in an op-ed written by the Kansas Reflector’s opinion editor, Clay Wirestone.

Listen, I understand why district officials and parents want guardrails for students’ online activities while in school. That makes sense. We don’t want them looking up porn or making threats in class.

But that’s not what Gaggle promised, or what Unified School District 497 spokeswoman Julie Boyle told Smith. Both justified privacy violations with high-minded rhetoric about protecting students’ mental health. I’m sorry, but count me skeptical that clunky AI and adults making less than three dollars above the federal minimum wage have made a serious difference in the well-being of Lawrence children.

Instead, what you might expect to happen indeed happened: False red flags, uncomfortable meetings with administrators and clear-cut violations of student rights.

It’s easy to see why Gaggle wouldn’t want this to happen. Its contract with this single Kansas school district is worth about $163,000 a year. And, unfortunately, it’s also easy to see why school officials would be reluctant to stop spying on students. After all, if something bad does happen and no spyware has been deployed, officials might be criticized for not doing all they can to prevent bad things from happening, even if it’s extremely unclear Gaggle’s spyware is capable of preventing these sorts of things from occurring.

One school administrator suggested school violence — like far too common school shootings — justified always-on surveillance. Others simply repeated the talking points about “student mental health,” apparently incapable (or unwilling) to recognize virtually peering over students’ shoulders isn’t actually all that helpful when it comes to addressing difficult issues students routinely face.

As Wirestone points out in his op-ed, there are far better ways to deal with these issues — none of which involve omnipresent surveillance of students’ web activity:

I would suggest that surveilling young people electronically, intercepting their communications and leaving hard calls to computers does more harm than good. Teens will learn they can’t trust the people around them. Building relationships and listening to those same young people might take time, but at least it can be done honestly. Rather than seizing on spyware, adults should consider addressing climate change, the cost of living, affordable college and other measures. That might give young people something to look forward to, rather than anticipate with mounting dread.

As it stands now, the school has only agreed to drop this surveillance of student journalists because it might violate state law. Rather than do the right thing and treat all students as equally deserving of privacy, the school has chosen to do the bare minimum. To paraphrase Futurama’s Hermes Conrad, the school has pretty much promised that “it will respect students’ rights to extent that the law requires.”

But clearing this extremely low bar doesn’t help the rest of the district’s students and it doesn’t make this school district any better than any other entity deploying the same sort of spyware because it has decided to turn over student oversight to third party algorithms. Instead, it just makes it the single district that can’t be sued for violating the rights of student journalists under Kansas state law. That’s nothing to be proud of.