A boy wrote about his suicide attempt. He didn’t realize his school’s Gaggle software was watching

Round-the-clock surveillance of students' accounts raises tricky privacy concerns. And do they really help keep kids safe?

In the midst of a pandemic and a national uprising, Teeth Logsdon-Wallace was kept awake at night last summer by the constant sounds of helicopters and sirens.

For the 13-year-old from Minneapolis, who lives close to where George Floyd was murdered in May 2020, the pandemic-induced isolation and social unrest amplified the emotional distress he was experiencing as a result of gender dysphoria. His billowing depression landed him in the hospital after he tried to kill himself. During that dark stretch, he spent his days in an outpatient psychiatric facility, where he listened to a punk song on loop that promised things would soon get better". Eventually they did.