Your Children Are Being Watched. NewsWire

NewsWire: 11/11/21

• The pandemic has led schools to embrace tracking software that follows students’ every move. Programs like GoGuardian and Securly record keystrokes, filter websites, and can even alert teachers to potentially at-risk students. (Bloomberg Businessweek)
• NH: High schools are amping up the installation of monitoring software on students’ laptops. Administrators claim this technology keeps kids on track, especially during times of remote learning. 
• So what do these programs actually do? They record every action a student makes on their laptop, from clicking on an article to typing an essay. The software also filters websites for explicit material. If a student is googling something taboo or playing a game during class, they are flagged, and a teacher can remotely take control of their device.
• Not all of this tracking is used for discipline. GoGuardian, the largest company in the field, monitors online activity correlated with self-harm. Teachers are promptly notified of at-risk students. 
• The adoption of this tech is quickly spreading. At the beginning of the pandemic, GoGuardian offered free trials to all schools across the country. This year, the company has made deals with the governments of West Virginia, Delaware, and New York City. These contracts encompass more than 23M students. And that’s just the outreach of one company. 
• Remarkably, there has been very little opposition to this software. A handful of Boomers have spoken out. Senator Elizabeth Warren has called the software an “invasion of privacy.” But many Xer parents are happy someone is looking after their kids. As for the students, this isn’t all that different from their home lives. As we wrote in a recent NewsWire, this generation has been highly supervised from a young age. Constant monitoring doesn't faze them. They want to follow the rules and please authority figures. (See “Are Kids Overruled?” and "Time to Rethink the Playdate.")
• Looking down the road, we don’t see any movement going the other way. The youngest Homelanders are even more supervised than their first-wave counterparts. And pandemic lockdowns have resulted in more parent-child proximity than ever before. To Homelanders, the always spying telescreens in 1984 aren't far from reality.