Privacy Activists Call Out UK Schools For Using An App To Monitor Students

As we're all too well aware, there's plenty of money to be made in the surveillance business. The best surveillance businesses, though, are those that rely on captive markets.

Sure, kids aren't actually captive," but they're in school often enough it's tempting to let tech pick up the slack when it comes to keeping tabs on students. That's not just ever-present cameras keeping an eye on hallways and RFID-chipped student IDs that allow administrators to track attendance and movement.

It's also embedded in the tech they use at school and bring home with them. It's the spyware schools install to help prevent abuse of laptops. It's the additional spyware that debuted during the COVID pandemic: anti-cheating software that does everything from continuously scan students' rooms and homes via laptop cameras to constantly monitoring their activities while performing schoolwork.

Now, there's a new wrinkle in always-on surveillance of students, as reported by Steven Morris for The Guardian.

Criminal justice and antiracist campaigners have raised concerns over an app being used by schools inBristolto monitor and profile" pupils and their families.

The app, which is being used by more than 100 schools, gives safeguarding leads quick, easy access to pupils' and their families' contacts with police, child protection and welfare services.

Sounds fairly innocuous. At least at first. Those raising concerns about the Think Family Education (TFE) app point out the app (and the database it utilizes, which contains data on 50,000 Bristol families) attempts to analyze" which students might be more at risk of exposure to criminality" - a phrase that could be used to cover anything from witnessing criminal acts to actually participating in them. Activists say this is the sort of thing that could lead to even more discriminatory policing efforts, using students' data as the leverage point.

Defenders of the app - most of them Bristol government officials and local police representatives - claim this is all above-board and no one needs to worry about what the government is doing with all this data. Their cheery statements are seemingly contradicted by the assertions of the educators who deal directly with these students, who feel there's pressure to keep this thing under wraps.

Staff using the app have toldthe criminal justice campaign charity Fair Trialsthat they keep it secret from parents and carers, and admitted many would be concerned about it if they knew of it.

Bristol city council and Avon and Somerset police, who worked together on the system, insist it is in place to protect children, not criminalise them, and deny it is secret, pointing out thatinformation about its existence is publicly available.

It's true. (Some) information about TFE is public. But what's included in this public information isn't exactly comforting. In fact, the Bristol government openly admits it is trying to pinpoint the sort of students who tend to have more frequent interactions with law enforcement - something that will undoubtedly lead to even more interactions, whether or not the student is actually at risk of anything, but just happens to live in an area where these sort of problems are commonplace.

Using targeted analytics, the system also helps identify children at risk of:

sexual exploitation
criminal exploitation
not being in education, employment, or training

Then there's the fact that the program and the app were developed without any input from perhaps the most crucial stakeholders:

TFE was piloted at 4 schools in Bristol and developed with input from:

safeguarding staff
education inclusion managers
safeguarding education teams
information governance consultants
school consultations

Great. Except I'm not seeing students or parents on that list. All I'm seeing is a bunch of people - some of them possibly capable of advocating for students and parents, rather than for the government's desires - who are going to be on the receiving end of the data collection. Almost no one directly targeted by this data collection was asked what they thought about this proposal.

Given that, it's unsurprising teachers might feel pressured to withhold information from parents and students about the TFE app. Especially when the program does things like this:

Schools using the TFE app receive alerts about children's and family members' contact with police, antisocial behaviour and domestic violence incidents. The system also gives schools access to sensitive personal details about families' financial situations.

That's a lot of information that shouldn't be in the hands of school administrators, at least if it's not being collected without truly informed consent. This doesn't appear to be an opt-in program. If your child attends one of these 100 schools in Bristol, you're a participant whether you know it or not.

It's not that something like this doesn't have the ability to do good. It's that when it's handled like this - bypassing express consent and moving forward without input from parents or students - it lends itself to abuse because only those running the TFE program know what it's truly capable of and how this data is being used.