Of the 164 EdTech products reviewed, 146 (89 percent) appeared to engage in data practices that put children’s rights at risk, contributed to undermining them, or actively infringed on these rights. These products monitored or had the capacity to monitor children, in most cases secretly and without the consent of children or their parents, in many cases harvesting data on who they are, where they are, what they do in the classroom, who their family and friends are, and what kind of device their families could afford for them to use.
Most online learning platforms installed tracking technologies that trailed children outside of their virtual classrooms and across the internet, over time. Some invisibly tagged and fingerprinted children in ways that were impossible to avoid or get rid of—even if children, their parents, and teachers had been aware and had the desire and digital literacy to do so—without throwing the device away in the trash.
Most online learning platforms sent or granted access to children’s data to third-party companies, usually advertising technology (AdTech) companies. In doing so, they appear to have permitted the sophisticated algorithms of AdTech companies the opportunity to stitch together and analyze these data to guess at a child’s personal characteristics and interests, and to predict what a child might do next and how they might be influenced. Access to these insights could then be sold to anyone—advertisers, data brokers, and others—who sought to target a defined group of people with similar characteristics online.
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