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November 2, 2019 02:10 am

Gaggle Knows Everything About Teens And Kids In School

Gaggle monitors the work and communications of almost 5 million students in the U.S., and schools are paying big money for its services. Hundreds of company documents unveil a sprawling surveillance industrial complex that targets kids who can't opt out. Caroline Haskins writes via BuzzFeed News: Using a combination of in-house artificial intelligence and human content moderators paid about $10 an hour, Gaggle polices schools for suspicious or harmful content and images, which it says can help prevent gun violence and student suicides. It plugs into two of the biggest software suites around, Google's G Suite and Microsoft 365, and tracks everything, including notifications that may float in from Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram accounts linked to a school email address. Gaggle touts itself as a tantalizingly simple solution to a diverse set of horrors. It claims to have saved hundreds of lives from suicide during the 2018-19 school year. The company, which is based in Bloomington, Illinois, also markets itself as a tool that can detect threats of violence. But hundreds of pages of newly revealed Gaggle documentation and content moderation policies, as well as invoices and student incident reports from 17 school districts around the country obtained via public records requests, show that Gaggle is subjecting young lives to relentless inspection, and charging the schools that use it upward of $60,000. And it's not at all clear whether Gaggle is as effective in saving lives as it claims, or that its brand of relentless surveillance is without long-term consequences for the students it promises to protect. [...] [S]tudent surveillance services like Gaggle raise questions about how much monitoring is too much, and what rights minors have to control the ways that they're watched by adults. "My sense about this particular suite of products and services is that it's a solution in search of a problem," said Sarah Roberts, a UCLA professor and a scholar in digital content moderation, "which is to say that the only way that the logic of it works is if we first accept that our children ought to be captured within a digital system, basically, from the time they're sentient until further notice." While Gaggle claims that its tool promotes a sense of "digital citizenship," BuzzFeed News says the newly revealed documents show that students often don't understand that their work and communications are being surveilled until they violate the rules.

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