Lance Vick has been hacking for a long time. As a teenager, one of his regular pastimes was hacking into school systems and exposing security bugs. When he recently came across a Washington Post article about a looming trend in U.S. schools to surveil students through their smartphones, he took to Twitter with a proposition.
“If you are at one of these schools asking you to install apps on your phone to track you, hit me up for some totally hypothetical academic ideas on how one might dismantle such a system,” he wrote. He told Teen Vogue the concept of tracking students is more than just questionable — it's a practice he views with “disgust.”
“The idea that students are being pressured into installing third-party monitoring software on their personal devices...is very saddening,” he said. “I’d probably react similarly to how many might react to students being handed cigarettes officially during admission.”
Over the past few decades, the role of education technology in classrooms has burgeoned, along with parallel concerns about student privacy and data protection. In August, three Democratic senators sent letters to Facebook and Google as well as several education companies — including the College Board, Pearson, ACT, and McGraw-Hill — demanding explanations about exactly where the data they gather on students goes. The letters came roughly one year after the FBI issued a public service announcement about the vulnerabilities of education technology. Specifically mentioned in one of the senators’ letters was a Wall Street Journal report about an incident last year in which hackers sought ransom money for the personal information of applicants to three U.S. colleges.
Apps can be especially vulnerable. “Most school administrators and even most legal professionals are not armed with the technical background to understand all the ways a simple app install can be abused,” Vick, who now works as the lead security engineer for cryptocurrency company BitGo, said. "AdGuard and Privacy International both did studies in 2018 showing more than 40% of free Android apps are equipped to share data with Facebook regardless of if [users] have an account or not. This does not count all the other smaller companies they share data with.”
A study published in 2018 by Fordham Law School’s Center on Law and Information Policy (CLIP) analyzed the education technology and student data marketplace over several years, and the results were a wake-up call. Researchers found not only an “overall lack of transparency in the student information commercial marketplace” but also no federal oversight to address the issue.
“Currently there is no federal privacy law in the United States that specifically targets the use, retention or resale of student data by private-sector data brokers,” the report said.
Some students feel mounting skepticism about the way their schools approach student privacy. This spring, Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) will implement Ram Attend, a tracking program that monitors student attendance using Wi-Fi access points. The app works like this: By logging into campus Wi-Fi, students will automatically trigger a recording of their location. A third party, Degree Analytics, will later compare the location history with their class schedules. Although attendance will be tracked at only three classes (which are required for all university students) during the semester and all students were given the ability to opt out, some VCU students claim they were not adequately informed about how to shield themselves from the change.
“Most of us found out through social media or rogue staff,” Tagwa Shammet, opinions editor at the university newspaper, told Teen Vogue. “Due to the secrecy of the program, the students were very angry and surprised. The opt-out process was hidden by the administration in a link in an email. The email was buried under a bunch of other unimportant university emails.”
A university spokesperson referred Teen Vogue to a special page on the school’s website created to provide information about the new program’s implementation. According to the page, the purpose of Ram Attend is to more accurately record student attendance; the pilot period will also gauge the plausibility of extending the program to larger classes in which “manual attendance is not feasible.” The university claims the only parties with access to the data will be university officials with “a legitimate academic need” to see it, as well as Degree Analytics, the company responsible for analyzing the data. The school’s website reiterates that Degree Analytics will only see numbers in place of students’ actual names, for privacy purposes. (Degree Analytics has not responded to Teen Vogue’s request for comment.) Despite the university’s attempts to keep the change transparent, Tagwa says many feel the administration wasn't entirely forthright about the introduction of this technology.
“Most students feel like this is an invasion of privacy, and I agree,” she said.
VCU isn’t the only school planning to monitor student attendance with controversial technology (or already doing so). Over 30 schools also use SpotterEDU, an “automated attendance” app that uses Bluetooth technology to record students’ attendance and notify their professors of their class habits. According to the Washington Post, the app aggregates the data into a point system that some professors use for grading. Hypothetically, school officials would be able to use the data to organize students into categories based on certain demographics, like race. Rick Carter, the app’s CEO, claims that SpotterEDU is “not a data collection company.”
“The only information that we actually get about a student is the type of device they have, the version of operating system that they’re running on their phone, the version of our app that they have, and then their class schedule,” he told Teen Vogue. “That’s it.”
According to Carter, every school using the app has seen the highest grade point average in its history within two years of implementation. In its five years of operation, SpotterEDU has never lost a client, Carter says. He adds that the company only tracks student attendance during class times, using Bluetooth beacons in classrooms, so “if they’re not there, we don’t know where they’re at.” He reiterated that the company doesn’t sell anyone’s information.
The app is gaining traction nationwide. A spokesperson for the University of Missouri told Teen Vogue that the school is gearing up to launch a pilot project of SpotterEDU on campus. The spokesperson called the decision a “very small test scenario.” The app has already been used by the school’s athletic department for several years, but administrators decided to increase its use to somewhere between 10 and 15 classes during the pilot period this semester. Christian Basi, the media relations director for the University of Missouri system, told Teen Vogue the decision was made in conjunction with student and faculty leadership.
“They’ve seen some value in potentially using the app, and so they wanted to be part of the test,” he said. “University of Missouri athletics has done an incredible job with the academic success of student athletes that we have on this campus; they attribute some of that success to being able to determine when a student was under academic stress. One of the first signs of that was when a student starts to not show up to class.”
In an interview with the Columbia Daily Tribune, Matt McCabe, the communications director for the Missouri Students Association (MSA) at the university, said the group is still waiting to “gauge student feedback” on the pilot program. According to Basi, the university official, student government largely has been supportive of the move. In an email to Teen Vogue, another student government representative confirmed that MSA has been in contact with the administration with respect to the pilot and looks forward to further conversations about its future at the university.
The university spokesperson assured the information will be kept securely and only shared with advisers or counselors. But Christian Cmehil-Warn, a student government representative and former president of the Mizzou Computing Association, said he still takes umbrage at the decision to pilot the app.
“It teaches students [that] it’s okay for those with power over you to track your movements, which is already a huge problem in workplaces and isn't something that should be seen as common or okay,” he said.
While student tracking appears to be less publicized at the elementary and high school levels, big tech’s presence in classrooms looms large there, too. In the 2017-2018 school year, the top five digital products used in K-12 classrooms were from Google; it’s a trend some call the “Google-ization of the classroom.” With the popularity of Google’s G Suite for Education — a collaborative Google platform with more than 90 million users worldwide as of April 2019, according to estimates provided by the company to Teen Vogue — some worry about how the tech leviathan may be using kids’ data. In their privacy notice for the product, Google does generally lay out how it collects user data, but advocates and parents are concerned about specifics. A Google spokesperson reiterated the company's ads policy for the G-Suite for Education service, which states that “there are no ads in G Suite for Education core services, and students’ personal information won’t be used to create ad profiles for targeting."
Student data can also shore up marketing strategies for colleges. College Board, the billion-dollar not-for-profit entity that administers examinations like the SAT, PSAT, and AP tests, reportedly charges colleges and universities roughly 47 cents per name every year to license the data of thousands of high school students. The program is called Student Search Service, and includes approximate test scores and certain student demographics. In 2017, College Board raked in nearly $100 million in overall revenue. Included in that figure are Student Search Service profits, which the company claims it reinvests into services for students, according to the Wall Street Journal.
“Students and their families need information to help them navigate the winding and complicated path to college and career,” College Board spokesperson Jaslee Carayol wrote in a statement to Teen Vogue, adding that the program is voluntary and that students can opt out of completing it. “Student Search fills that need, providing information that can support their transition to college, particularly for historically underrepresented student populations who are already disproportionately unlikely to apply, enroll, and graduate from college.”
Students like Alex Rodriguez aren’t buying that explanation. Alex is a senior at the Urban Assembly School for Law and Justice in Brooklyn, New York, and codirector of policy at Teens Take Charge. A child of immigrant parents, he says the college application process was a completely new experience for him. He unwittingly opted into Student Search and later admitted that he had no idea he was “violat[ing]” his own student privacy rights. Although he thinks education technology is a “good tool,” he thinks the “wrong people have control over it.”
“Until students have more power and voice as to how they’re educated, I think education technology is something we need to reconsider,” he said.
Want more from Teen Vogue? Check this out: Why Some Teachers Are Getting Rid of Grades
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