The Dangers of School Surveillance Technology

Why is it necessary?

According to the National Institute of Justice’ most recent School Survey On Crime and Safety, during the 2017–2018 school year 71% of schools reported at least one incident of violent crime¹. As the occurrence of school shootings, bomb threats, suicides, and more within schools has continued to rise, some schools are starting to invest in technology that may be able to spot potential sources of violence and raise the alarms in order to stop things before they can start. Some of the technology being implemented includes facial recognition and sentiment, monitoring tools implemented on public social media, and filtering of emails sent by students.

What exactly is it?

An example of this preventative technology is the Florida Schools Safety Portal, which was implemented on August 1st of 2020 in several Florida schools. The Safety Portal is a social media monitoring tool which “allows school threat assessment teams to identify, assess and provide intervention services for individuals whose behavior may pose a threat to themselves or others”². Another example of data monitoring in schools is done by a company called Gaggle. Gaggle analyses student emails and searches for keywords and phrases in order to spot potential threats³. Both of these systems are parsing through data taken from students without their knowledge or consent in order to search for key information that may be a precursor to in-school violence. While both of these examples seem very reasonable, they are just a glimpse into the surveillance strategies schools are using to watch students. The Electronic Fear Foundation highlights the fact that “ schools are experimenting with the very same surveillance technologies that totalitarian governments use to surveil and abuse the rights of their citizens everywhere: online, offline, and on their phones”, showing the extent that schools are going when using student information⁷.

What could possibly go wrong?

From a micro ethical standpoint, this data monitoring technique used in schools comes with a variety of issues. Schools are already at high risk of cyber attack that comes with the amount of data they possess on individuals, so when a third-party is introduced to monitor activity of this data, the private information of students is more susceptible to cyber-attacks. Both administrators and third-parties gain the ability to attain complete access to what students are doing online, which is a huge threat to both privacy and security⁷. In addition, the monitoring systems have been shown to be inherently racist when tagging concerning language, with the Brennan Center for Justice stating that “These factors suggest that social media monitoring tools are likely to disproportionately tag students of color as dangerous and that those students will be punished more severely than white students who are similarly identified”⁵. Mislabeling a student as dangerous, whether it be on the basis of race or otherwise, can lead to severe reputational and emotional harms. When taken out of digital context, an algorithm can only correctly predict the true nature of an email or social media post to a certain extent. Being able to read and interpret digital context is tricky, and when it can lead to significant harm to students it must be questioned⁶.

One of the main macro ethical concerns that these systems create is the issue of safety versus privacy and security of students. The rights of students, including a potential danger to freedom of speech and expression, are contested against the need for safety, and a question arises: at what point is it better to risk violence in schools in order to maintain privacy for all students? Both Gaggle and the Safety Portal have stopped instances of school violence and suicide and have shown to be helpful in reducing these atrocities, but where does the data monitoring stop for these students? Data is being sifted through without the knowledge or consent of students, which is problematic⁴. While the privacy of students is compromised in this regard, the students are also at a higher risk of having their information leaked because schools are at a higher risk of cyber attacks when using these systems⁵.

Questions That Must Be Asked

When examining all ethical concerns raised by this technology, it becomes evident that the question arises: who does the responsibility of protecting the privacy of students belong to? Both the companies who implement the systems, as well as the school administrators who decide which systems to implement, owe it to students to protect their information and rights as both students and human beings. Administrators must be able to find a balance between protecting the physical safety of their students as well as the safety of the information they have access to about their students. It is their responsibility to watch over the systems and companies they choose to implement within their schools in order to maintain the integrity of the information they have. While it is important for schools to remain vigilant, it is also important for companies to ensure that their systems are ethical and fair when searching for red flags, as well as respectful of the rights of those whose data they are sifting through.

Although students, school administrations, and surveillance companies are the groups that are most directly impacted with the use of this school safety technology, they are not the only stakeholders. Also involved are the parents of the students, the engineers who design the systems, and the general communities surrounding schools. The parents of students have to worry about the safety of their children being protected while receiving an education, and they are also impacted by the information shared about their children because much of it is directly connected to them. The engineers who design these algorithms and systems have a collective responsibility to protect the individuals the system will be used on, and hold a share in the impact of this technology because it directly reflects back onto them and the companies they work for. Schools represent a subset of the general public, and a question of the extent to which social control should be allowed is raised. If full surveillance is allowed in schools to promote safety, it may be argued that these invasive surveillance systems should be implemented more widely throughout the public. This raises further issues of ethical harms to privacy and security.

Conclusion

In conclusion, this relatively new practice is one that needs to be implemented with thoughtfulness and input from all stakeholders. Its implementation has the potential to save lives, but also holds the power to severely harm them in a myriad of ways. Through examining both the micro and macro ethical issues that school surveillance creates, a safe solution for all stakeholders can be found more easily.

Resources:

1. Frederique, N., & About the author Nadine Frederique. (n.d.). What Do the Data Reveal About Violence in Schools? National Institute of Justice. https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/what-do-data-reveal-about-violence-schools#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20latest%20available,71%25%20in%202009%2D2010.
2. Reid, S., & Braun, J. (n.d.). Florida Schools Safety Portal and Social Media Monitoring. http://www.fdle.state.fl.us/MSDHS/Meetings/2019/August/August-15-200pm-Florida-Schools-Safety-Presentatio.aspx.
3. Bartlett, K. (2019, September 27). Safety versus privacy: Williamson County School introduces new ‘Gaggle’ student surveillance program. The Tennessean. https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/local/williamson/franklin/2019/09/26/williamson-county-schools-gaggle-safety-management-platform/2431029001/.
4. University, S. C. (n.d.). Privacy, Technology, and School Shootings: An Ethics Case Study. Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. https://www.scu.edu/ethics/privacy/case-study-on-online-privacy/.
5. Jacobson, A., Batterson, K. C. and L., Kelley, K., & McEvoy, N. (2020, February 21). Home. Risk Management. http://www.rmmagazine.com/2020/03/02/the-risks-of-school-surveillance-technology/.
6. Valor, S. (n.d.). An Introduction to Data Ethics. https://www.scu.edu/media/ethics-center/technology-ethics/IntroToDataEthics.pdf.
7. Gebhart, M. W. and G. (2020, March 21). Schools Are Pushing the Boundaries of Surveillance Technologies. Electronic Frontier Foundation. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/02/schools-are-pushing-boundaries-surveillance-technologies.