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Mandatory Student Spyware Is Creating a Perfect Storm of Human Rights Abuses

EFF: “Spyware apps were foisted on students at the height of the Covid-19 lockdowns. Today, long after most students have returned to in-person learning, those apps are still proliferating, and enabling an ever-expanding range of human rights abuses. In a recent Center for Democracy and Technology report, 81 percent of teachers said their schools use some form of this “student monitoring” spyware. Yet many of the spyware companies supplying these apps seem neither prepared nor concerned about the harms they are inflicting on students.  These student spyware apps promise scalable surveillance-as-a-service. The lure of “scalability” is a well-documented source of risk to marginalized users, whose needs for individualized consideration are overshadowed by the prospect of building mass-scale, one-size-fits-all “solutions” to social problems. The problems of scale are dangerously exacerbated by laws that disparately impact marginalized communities…”

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