Spying on Kids to Prevent School Shootings Will Backfire
Politicians want to impose tech surveillance in schools. If they do, we’ll lose the one thing necessary to stop attacks.
“As a busy parent, reading every text message, post, and email just isn’t realistic.”
If you’re a parent, this line, which comes from the website for a service called Bark, sounds correct. But Bark isn’t talking about the texts and emails that you receive—it’s talking about the ones sent to your kids. Bark is a surveillance tool that uses language detection to monitor text messages, emails, and social media interactions for any “potential safety concerns.” And the company markets its product to schools.
Following the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman High School in Parkland, Florida, Bark offered its surveillance services, for free, to all public and private K-12 schools in the United States. The company now claims to have a presence within more than 1,300 school districts.
Bark isn’t the only technology finding its way into school districts across America. Schools are either installing or at least considering everything from facial recognition to iris scans to gunfire-detecting microphones. And if Senate Republicans have their way, these kinds of programs will soon become even more pervasive. Last week, Senator John Cornyn proposed an update to the Children’s Internet Protection Act, which, if passed, would reportedly compel schools to implement tech monitoring as part of a strategy to reduce school mass shootings.
Senate Republicans are essentially proposing a system that imposes total surveillance within U.S. schools. Students would receive their education in an environment where their every move is monitored and analyzed. Regardless of how effective that might be, it also risks eroding kids’ trust, which matters because trust may be the very thing necessary to prevent the horrors legislators are trying to stop.
In January, a team of researchers from the London School of Economics released a report that examined children’s data and online privacy. Their study found that surveillance had several negative side effects for children. “It might obstruct children’s development of important skills,” the…
