In-person teaching has resumed in the US – but electronic snooping hasn’t stopped | Arwa Mahdawi

School surveillance software is marketed as a way to keep kids safe, but experts are concerned it's used to punish students rather than protect them

Getting your kid ready to go back to school in the US? Well, you're going to need all the essentials then: a bulletproof backpack and a school-issued tablet or laptop, pre-programmed with creepy spyware. During the pandemic, remote schooling led to a boom in surveillance software which let teachers monitor everything kids were doing on school-issued devices. Now that in-person teaching has resumed, however, the electronic monitoring hasn't stopped. Rather, it has increased. According to a new report from the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), 89% of teachers have said that their schools will continue using student-monitoring software, up 5% from last year.

Arwa Mahdawi's new book, Strong Female Lead, is available for order