Teacher here. I use GoGuardian on a regular basis. I'll qualify what I'm about to say with the lead-in that I think student privacy is a major issue that needs to be dealt with. It sits right...
Exemplary
Teacher here.
I use GoGuardian on a regular basis.
I'll qualify what I'm about to say with the lead-in that I think student privacy is a major issue that needs to be dealt with. It sits right alongside (underneath?) broad digital privacy protections in general. People who know me here on Tildes know that I'm very protective of my own personal privacy, and I wish I lived in a country that made deliberate and meaningful efforts to support me in that. The way I feel about myself personally goes quadruple for my students, who are only kids and are much more vulnerable given that they've never lived in a world that hasn't tracked them.
With that said, I don't think this article is particularly helpful. In fact, I think it's counterproductive. It feels to me like it's a casualty of the now omnipresent need for internet content to shallowly stoke outrage rather than commit to more nuanced, in-depth analysis. The "Red Flag Quiz" they made and headings like "Replacing Social Workers with Big Brother" feel like they're made more for virality than for accurately depicting the actual landscape on which platforms like GoGuardian live.
For one, it's clear that the EFF didn't talk to any teachers before writing this. GoGuardian is exclusively characterized as a method of surveillance rather than a legitimate tool. Furthermore, it gets some basic information about GoGuardian just plain wrong. For example: what it calls "Scenes" are actually called "Sessions". A "Scene" is something you can apply within a "Session", so it's an easy mistake to make, but it feels really sloppy to me. Imagine reading an article complaining about, say, Windows, but the author kept mistakenly calling it "Microsoft Explorer". Their complaints would lose a lot of credibility.
My school started using GoGuardian, like so many other schools did, when the COVID pandemic hit. We had used it a bit in very limited contexts prior to the pandemic, but it didn't become an everyday, household name until schools shut down and all of our classes shifted online.
The reason for getting GoGuardian was not because we suddenly wanted to surveil our students from their homes. The reason for getting GoGuardian was because it would allow us to better instruct students from their homes.
To explain why, I have to talk a bit about modern teaching. I imagine many of us here, especially the older folks, have an image of teaching as someone sitting at a desk or standing in front of a class. That teacher talks to the class, conveys information, the students listen and write things down, and that's pretty much it.
This is not the case in modern education, particularly in the United States.
In my role as a teacher, I'm rarely lecturing or giving whole-class instruction. After I do, I'm not sitting at my desk for the rest of the period. I'm walking around the room, assessing students' progress and understanding, checking in with individual students, identifying pain points or misunderstandings with the material, answering questions, encouraging and directing peer collaboration, etc. It's continual, ongoing, individualized support, conferencing, and, yes, monitoring.
On a brief walk around my classroom, I'm not idly strolling -- I'm actively scanning the papers of the students in front of me:
Did he correctly balance that chemical equation?
What meaning did she find in the author's imagery on lines 19 to 20?
Did that student who used the wrong trig identity yesterday learn to fix their mistakes today?
I'm also continually acting on those in-the-moment observations, integrating them with my knowledge of the students, their abilities, and their work habits, and judging how best to intervene or support them if needed. One student might like direct pointers; another might prefer to work with a peer to clear up a misunderstanding. One student might be able to bounce back from an error, while another might be derailed by it.
Gone are the days of waiting until the test at the end of the unit to know if a student knows how to perform certain skills. How and what I do is continually informed by what's happening in the classroom on a moment-to-moment basis, with misconceptions and supports deployed almost instantaneously. At the end of any given class, I can pretty accurately tell you who learned what and who didn't. I can also identify areas of instruction for the following day: common misconceptions, edge cases, new or novel situations to integrate what they've learned, etc.
I know we have a lot of software developers here, and it's not an exact metaphorical fit, but modern teaching looks a lot more like the agile model of project management than the waterfall one.
Anyway, this has been the norm of what I do for as long as I've been in this career. It's so normal I don't even realize I'm doing it most of the time. It's second nature -- the life-sustaining oxygen in the room I'm not even aware that I'm breathing.
So then, something big happens: COVID hits.
And schools shut down.
Classrooms are empty. Kids are now tasked with learning from home.
What this means for me is that I no longer have a classroom to walk around in. The oxygen of my career -- evaluating and supporting student learning in the moment -- is suddenly gone.
I can't observe the papers on their desks because they're not at their desks. I can't check in on what they're doing in my class because they're literally not in my class. What I can do is broadcast myself via video to them, sitting at home. I can talk them through a lesson, showing them how to do something new. I can then let them try, giving them some practice problems and I... what? Sit there blankly staring at my webcam?
Am I back to the waterfall, chalk-and-talk model of teaching? Do I wait three weeks for the unit test to know if they've learned something?
GoGuardian was a useful tool during the pandemic because it replicated the in-person environment I was used to on the backdrop of an all-virtual distance learning setup. It let me see what my students were doing, in the moment. I could assign them work on a digital plaform, and then I could watch them do it, see their process, and address their misunderstandings on the fly.
It gave me my oxygen back.
GoGuardian has a built in chat feature. I used that constantly to message students individually, while they were working, helping them figure out new concepts and identify mistakes. I could use GoGuardian to video chat with groups of students, so I'd pull three or four kids who weren't getting it into their own private small group live help session. GoGuardian became my eyes for my students' work during COVID, as well as the way I could individually support them as they worked. It would have been impossible for me to see what they were doing and support them as individuals otherwise (Google Meet for example, which I also used regularly, launched with only global chat, meaning all messages could be read by everyone in a meeting, for example -- I hopefully don't need to explain how terrible this would be for a virtual classroom setting).
Now that we're out of COVID, I don't use GoGuardian as much. I'd much rather walk around my classroom and see things with my own eyes and have in-person conversations than digital chat-based ones, but I'd be lying if I said it wasn't still great for certain circumstances. Written assignments, in particular, are difficult to "scan" easily from a distance due to handwriting issues and the fact that if I stand over a student's shoulder to read their writing for a minute, it's excruciating for both me and that student.
If I pop on a GoGuardian session and have the students type their responses on their computers, however, it's trivial for me to bounce from screen to screen and check in on their progress. It is stunningly more efficient and less awkward than circulating the classroom.
Another teacher I work with runs our after-school virtual homework support program. Students can log in from home to ask questions and get help with their homework on any given night. She uses GoGuardian for that extensively. Helping the kids out would be nearly impossible without it.
I suppose you could distill down what we are doing to be the "surveillance" of students, but that characterization feels wrong to me because it implies a maliciousness that isn't really there, as well as a complete lack of appreciation for the genuine richness enabled by the practice. Doing what I do makes me a better teacher and helps my students learn better. I wouldn't be nearly as effective at what I did if I weren't continually "gathering data" by "monitoring" my students as they worked.
This is why I balk at the article's suggestion that GoGuardian is merely a surveillance platform. It was genuinely invaluable during the pandemic shutdowns, and it remains valuable today, though it's less essential than it was.
This is to say nothing of the other things it offers, particularly site blocking. @Wolf_359 discusses it in their comment here, but handing kids a device with unfettered access to the internet and expecting them to remain focused and on-task through sheer willpower is not developmentally appropriate.
I can't speak in detail to the higher-level GoGuardian functions like Beacon that are brought up. These are quite literally "above" me in that I don't have access to them. It's my understanding that these are "always on" for student devices, which is very different from what I get. This article makes it sound like teachers are willingly putting students in panopticons, but that's not the case. The only way I get information on my students is by choosing to open a Session during which I can see their screens, view their open tabs, chat with them, and see a timeline of their active tabs. When the Session closes, that data stream stops for me, and I have no access to anything of theirs. I am only provided with data when I actively initiate it, and I don't get any content warnings from that view. Those, from Beacon, only go to administrators and counselors (as far as I know).
When I do open a Session, students are notified on their devices that there's an active GoGuardian session, so they are aware that a teacher is monitoring them. If I were to turn on a Session outside of school hours, I'd likely see nothing because I only get information if the student's Chromebook is on and active (and with how few of my students do homework, I'm assuming that their laptops don't open again until the moment they walk back in the school's doors the next morning).
The other big omission this article makes is that GoGuardian tracks student behavior on school devices. When the article says that administrators "have nearly unfettered access to huge amounts of data about students, including browsing histories, documents, videos, app and extension data, and content filtering and alerts", it makes it sound like the entire student's digital life is up for view. The truth is that GoGuardian isn't showing me what they looked up on their phones or their home computers -- it's showing only what they looked up on their school-issued Chromebooks.
Granted, this is still a privacy concern, especially because kids, developmentally, aren't in a place where they can fully separate out their "work" and "personal" selves, but it's not nearly as invasive as it sounds either. I think we all acknowledge (and are generally quite comfortable with) the expectation that our work devices are not ours and that we aren't guaranteed privacy on them. I actively talk with my students about exactly this. Their Chromebooks are not their hardware; they're not on their own network; their purpose is not for personal use. I talk about how I don't do any personal stuff on my work laptop and how the IT department for our district can see everything I do including view my search history and read my emails. I tell them how I limit my personal stuff to my personal devices, and I don't put those on my school's network.
And then I talk with them about how, even on their personal devices, they aren't getting privacy anyway because Google and Facebook and Snapchat are tracking everything they do too. This is where my students stop listening because I sound like an old man quite literally yelling at the cloud and also the quickest way to for me to sound out of touch is to make TikTok sound like its anything but the best, most exciting thing in the world.
Anyway, I've said a lot, but the article feels fear-mongery to me in a bad way. My biggest problem is that I feel like it commits pretty big lies of omission about what GoGuardian actually does. I also feel like its complaints come across more as provocations rather than from a place of legitimate concern. As a beleaguered teacher, I’ve read way too many articles rabble rousing about problems with education and very few that seem interested in genuinely solving them or even diving below the surface to attempt to explain why those issues came about in the first place. It gets tiring being an endless political and social football. We’re starving for solutions in education but people only seem to write about us when they want to get people mad.
I'm someone who wants better privacy protection for everyone, students especially, but this article leaves me with no other takeaways on that front than "be mad at GoGuardian". That doesn't sit right with me, because, as a teacher, I believe it is a legitimately useful educational tool.
This is an incredible comment and some great lived experience. Would you mind if I shared some of your thoughts with my coworkers at GG? I don't work on Teacher but I know some of the people on...
This is an incredible comment and some great lived experience. Would you mind if I shared some of your thoughts with my coworkers at GG? I don't work on Teacher but I know some of the people on the product team that would love to hear what you had to say.
Not at all. Go for it! I also appreciate you asking for permission. Thanks for being so considerate. The only thing I don’t want is my handle here to suddenly end up in some sort of wider...
Not at all. Go for it!
I also appreciate you asking for permission. Thanks for being so considerate.
The only thing I don’t want is my handle here to suddenly end up in some sort of wider spotlight. I’m able to speak as candidly as I do here entirely because I’m an internet nobody and this has no connection to my real identity. Not saying they would or anything, but I’d prefer if my words didn’t end up on X or Instagram or anything like that with wide reach.
Also, on a related note, please don’t use any of it for marketing! Again, not saying y’all would, but I had a bad experience with another edtech company using feedback I gave them in marketing copy without my consent. I wasn’t very happy about that one.
Instead of unloading my cynical side to you like I’m doing right now though, what I should be saying instead is thank you for the kind words and the useful product you make!
Thank you. Are there free periodicals you like that report on the education sector? My rss has room for more sources. I appreciate the feeling that went into your answer and I don't want to sound...
Thank you.
Are there free periodicals you like that report on the education sector? My rss has room for more sources.
I appreciate the feeling that went into your answer and I don't want to sound blase. I did hope the article would spark strong discussion. But I am now less likely to post anything from the EFF directly in future. As you say, there were errors in the article and sloppiness. I share some, not all, priorities with EFF, but I want to deal with thoughtful, thorough research, especially when making controversial arguments.
EdWeek is the only one I know of off the top of my head. The caveat is that this isn’t an endorsement of it, because I genuinely don’t know how it is. I don’t really follow educational news. I...
EdWeek is the only one I know of off the top of my head. The caveat is that this isn’t an endorsement of it, because I genuinely don’t know how it is. I don’t really follow educational news. I already live enough of it!
As for the EFF, while I was harsh on this article, I don’t think they should be judged entirely by it. I’m a big fan of not distilling large, complex things into single moments or angles, and from what I understand the EFF is generally well received and respected. It’s likely this article was simply a misstep more than indicative of any larger pattern (though, like with EdWeek, I genuinely don’t know — I don’t follow them either!).
My wife (a former teacher) is currently finishing up an MA in Information Science. She's doing a piece around digital literacy and she's starting to talk quite loudly about systems like these....
School administrators using GoGuardian’s “Admin” tool have nearly unfettered access to huge amounts of data about students, including browsing histories, documents, videos, app and extension data, and content filtering and alerts.
My wife (a former teacher) is currently finishing up an MA in Information Science. She's doing a piece around digital literacy and she's starting to talk quite loudly about systems like these.
Rather than actually educate kids (who later becoming funtioning people) on how to use the internet to look after yourself, what to avoid and how to disemble crap information. We end up with adminstrators / MPs / political-figures smashing huge sums of money into draconian tools like this to "keep kids safe."
Actually giving people skills keeps them safe. Giving them safe spaces, keeps them safe. Storing ALL their personal data in a third party? Yeah... not so much it turns out.
Edit this has been denied by someone who claims to work there. I am leaving it up to provide context. I found this particularly egregious. If it were widely known I think parents would object.
Edit this has been denied by someone who claims to work there. I am leaving it up to provide context.
I found this particularly egregious. If it were widely known I think parents would object.
In some cases, this has even given teachers the ability to view student webcam footage without their consent when they are in their homes.
This isn't true, and its bad reporting on the part of the journalist. What they were talking about was a vulnerability with Google meet which was patched very quickly, not an intended feature....
This isn't true, and its bad reporting on the part of the journalist. What they were talking about was a vulnerability with Google meet which was patched very quickly, not an intended feature.
Good to know, thank you. The larger conversation about this type of software is worth having but I don't want to spread misinformation. I think I'm going to leave the quote to add context to your...
Good to know, thank you.
The larger conversation about this type of software is worth having but I don't want to spread misinformation. I think I'm going to leave the quote to add context to your denial. Otherwise people will just find it in the article and believe it.
To add on to what @OBLIVIATER shared, it happened during the beginning of the COVID pandemic when schools were unexpectedly shut down and had to pivot to using software that was rushed out the...
To add on to what @OBLIVIATER shared, it happened during the beginning of the COVID pandemic when schools were unexpectedly shut down and had to pivot to using software that was rushed out the door by companies trying to meet demands for virtual conferencing. Early Google Meet was a rough product, and even the more mature Zoom at the time had major issues with things like “Zoombombings”.
It’s not to say that there aren’t issues or concerns in these areas, but this particular example isn’t representative and is highly inflammatory absent context.
Honestly? Given how many people have Alexa, GoogleHubs and such at home? I'd doubt it. People happily give away freedom and privacy for sheer convenience. Privacy is just something you need if...
Honestly? Given how many people have Alexa, GoogleHubs and such at home? I'd doubt it. People happily give away freedom and privacy for sheer convenience. Privacy is just something you need if you're upto something shady, right?
I'm not so sure. If you know that your teacher, someone who had direct contact with your child, could at a moments notice watch them through the webcam...I think a lot of Karen's would freak out...
I'm not so sure. If you know that your teacher, someone who had direct contact with your child, could at a moments notice watch them through the webcam...I think a lot of Karen's would freak out...
It'll bother some folks aye. But I suspect others will just see it as a disciplinary function. People are easily placated over things like this. Also, concerned parents wouldn't be a 'Karen'.
It'll bother some folks aye. But I suspect others will just see it as a disciplinary function.
Sorry everyone, but as a teacher we really need a monitoring software. Kids don't have executive functioning skills and they have zero self-control when it comes to choosing between games and...
Sorry everyone, but as a teacher we really need a monitoring software. Kids don't have executive functioning skills and they have zero self-control when it comes to choosing between games and classwork. This is true 100x more now that most special ed. classes are integrated and the ADHD kiddos are in general ed. classrooms. I'm very pro-integration as a special ed. teacher, but truly, it's better for everyone in that room if Johnny ADHD can't play games and Susan Autism can't read manga. I make this joke with immense love for my special ed. kiddos. But it really can throw the whole room off!
Even adults have this issue. How many of us have opened up Steam (or Tildes!) for "just a few minutes" when we should be getting something done at work or home?
In addition, kids are dealing with bullying, self-harm, drugs, etc. When this happens online, we often have no window into these issues until it's too late. Luckily, many kids are naive enough to Google it while using their school computer during second period. There have been several times where I've forwarded kiddos to a social worker because of their computer usage.
Now, if only GoGuardian could protect the computers from physical damage. Man, you wouldn't believe some of the laptops I've seen. The boys just punch them and throw them, the girls have makeup and glitter caked into the keyboard. And our school's solution is that if you break a new laptop, you get one of the older, barely functioning models. In other words, the kids who need the least resistance between them and learning often have the shittiest laptops with the most problems. Makes my life hard when a kid has a legitimate excuse for not getting an assignment done - for example, if their old laptop literally won't open the assignment or connect to the Internet.
I appreciate your expert opinion. What do you propose should be done re lgbt kids, or kids who may be dealing with pregancy, especially in red states or conservative countries? Also, perhaps the...
I appreciate your expert opinion. What do you propose should be done re lgbt kids, or kids who may be dealing with pregancy, especially in red states or conservative countries? Also, perhaps the tech people here can assist, but there are reports that data collected can be deanonymized by third parties, or just hacked.
When I was in high school, I just assumed the computer lab computers were able to monitor anything I was doing on them already. As long as this is only used on school-provided computers, I don’t...
When I was in high school, I just assumed the computer lab computers were able to monitor anything I was doing on them already. As long as this is only used on school-provided computers, I don’t really see how it’s any different.
Sure, there are privacy concerns, but that’s why I wouldn’t use it for anything non-school related. If the computer is off, and I’m not using it, there’s no data to be had from it.
I think the best place to look something up “anonymously” would be in the computer lab at a library (not at school), using a guest account. Which is (one of the reasons) why I’m an ardent supporter of public libraries.
I know you don't represent the company, but as another teacher who uses it every day, I just want to say Thank you guys for being the only thing standing between me and students playing games...
I know you don't represent the company, but as another teacher who uses it every day, I just want to say
Thank you guys for being the only thing standing between me and students playing games nonstop on their computers (something even adults have trouble with at work and at home when they're supposed to be productive)
GG needs to up their game just a little bit! We had a different monitoring software that worked incredibly well and then just stopped working completely after several years. We switched to GG and the number of times that a kid is inexplicably not showing up as online is infuriating! They will be playing a game and I'll tell them to get off it. The smart ones say, "okay, sorry," and then wait to see if I can actually close them out. If I can't they just try to sneak the game when I'm not looking. Ugh! Haha.
If I was on the product team I'd be able to give you an explanation, but unfortunately I don't have much insight into that. I will suggest you reach out to our support team if you are having...
If I was on the product team I'd be able to give you an explanation, but unfortunately I don't have much insight into that. I will suggest you reach out to our support team if you are having continuous issues, they're good people and will try their best to help out.
GoGuardian is only supposed to be used on school issued devices, schools have a lot of liability on what happens on the school's property meaning they are legally required to have software with...
GoGuardian is only supposed to be used on school issued devices, schools have a lot of liability on what happens on the school's property meaning they are legally required to have software with similar functions to GoGuardian. Students are made aware of what GoGuardian does and how it works, and they are warned not to use school property for improper things, or even personal use at all.
This really isn't different from using the computer lab at school to do things you aren't supposed to. You're going to get caught and get in trouble for looking up porn or playing games during classes.
Also the writers stance on Beacon is pretty grim even for this article. This line in particular was frustrating
GoGuardian touts anecdotal evidence of the system working, but from our research, the flagging inside of Beacon may not be much more accurate than its other flagging features.
Our "anecdotal evidence" is proven by data in our system and by school administrators providing testimonials, whereas their "research" is not cited at all and they likely didn't even have any access to the system to even perform a proper study. I believe this is dishonest at best, and downright misinformation at worse.
First of all, Beacon is never advertised as a replacement for social workers or mental health professionals, its advertised as a tool to help alert when children are struggling, if a school decides to use it in leu of proper healthcare that's not something we can control or even encourage. We have many testimonies from dozens of schools and social workers who all swear that Beacon saved children's lives and that they have students who have thanked them for stepping in and helping them during a huge struggle in their lives.
At the end of the day my viewpoint is this, you shouldn't expect to use school property like your own personal device without concessions that the school has to cover its ass. I guarantee you there are a lot more parents out there that support the use of software like GoGuardian provides than have issues with it, like it or not, this is something that schools require these days.
Edit: This is not the official stance of the company, I do not speak for the company, I am not in a position of influence for decisions for the company. I'm a ground level employee who's been there for 4 years and seen these scaremongering stories come and go many times.
But if students are getting reported (and thus potentially getting in trouble) for doing benign things like college applications, counseling and therapy sites, and sites with information about...
This really isn't different from using the computer lab at school to do things you aren't supposed to. You're going to get caught and get in trouble for looking up porn or playing games during classes.
But if students are getting reported (and thus potentially getting in trouble) for doing benign things like college applications, counseling and therapy sites, and sites with information about LGBT issues, that's not harmless. Even if flagged activity is manually reviewed by school admins before it goes any further, those latter two mean that this alone could cause massive harm to closeted students in the US in states where parents and/or school admins aren't (or can't be) on their side.
EDIT TO ADD: Worth noting that the above concerns are not hypothetical, as reported in this article about troubles with Gaggle, a competitor in the space. This article was linked in the EFF's report.
I work in a vaguely similar field (I'm in data science and my company sells software that monitors employee communication for legal and compliance issues) so I completely get how impossible it is to completely eliminate false positives. But certain types of false positives have a disproportionate potential to cause harm, and unless EFF is straight-up lying about the types of sites that are flagged, there's definitely stuff that gives me pause here.
If a student gets in trouble for doing college applications/counseling/therapy I'm not sure how that's anything but a terrible reflection on the teacher/administration. GoGuardian is a tool, if...
If a student gets in trouble for doing college applications/counseling/therapy I'm not sure how that's anything but a terrible reflection on the teacher/administration. GoGuardian is a tool, if its being used stupidly there's not much you can do about it. While its possible to flag something like that, its not like GoGuardian takes action on its own, it simply alerts a person as to the behavior, if the person looks at the site and thinks its harmful (which I don't think any sane person would) that's their choice. I will say there was a big internal push a few years back by LGBT resource groups to make sure our systems aren't alerting on potentially damaging content, and we've seen a lot of improvement in that field.
As for the Gaggle point, I can't speak much to it since I don't work for Gaggle, but I've long since had a lot of disdain for that company. They don't take privacy seriously like we do, they high 3rd party contractors to review student alerts, and they have pretty shady marketing.
Thank you for adding context. Issues like this are complex and nuanced. But I am worried for pregnant teens and gay teens, especially in certain US states.
Thank you for adding context. Issues like this are complex and nuanced. But I am worried for pregnant teens and gay teens, especially in certain US states.
I share your concern to a certain extent. I believe the path forward is better funding for the education system and training to make sure that things like this aren't a threat to student's safety....
I share your concern to a certain extent. I believe the path forward is better funding for the education system and training to make sure that things like this aren't a threat to student's safety. Unfortunately right now we're in a very tumultuous time in the United States, and safety from threats and suicide is more prevalent on people's minds than privacy and autonomy.
In a perfect world I wish something like this didn't have to exist, but for the world we live in right now, I'm glad it does.
Issues with underage people always have to balance protection with freedom, but especially with teens the issues become difficult. Thank you for sharing your perspective.
Issues with underage people always have to balance protection with freedom, but especially with teens the issues become difficult. Thank you for sharing your perspective.
I have nothing close to enough understanding to draw conclusions either way on this - I hadn’t even heard of the software until this conversation - but they do cite their sources and methodology...
Our "anecdotal evidence" is proven by data in our system and by school administrators providing testimonials, whereas their "research" is not cited at all and they likely didn't even have any access to the system to even perform a proper study. I believe this is dishonest at best, and downright misinformation at worse.
Smart alerts were depreciated years ago, we've been using Beacon since 2020. It appears his data is outdated. For the beacon section they said they only got data from two school districts, and...
Smart alerts were depreciated years ago, we've been using Beacon since 2020. It appears his data is outdated.
For the beacon section they said they only got data from two school districts, and even then we're only provided a few sample alerts, hardly conclusive research. I don't believe they have enough data to support their claims
Fascinating. I'm a teacher that uses GoGuardian every day, but I exclusively use it for its whitelist ability, so that I know the kids are using the chromebook for class stuff. I didn't know it...
Fascinating. I'm a teacher that uses GoGuardian every day, but I exclusively use it for its whitelist ability, so that I know the kids are using the chromebook for class stuff. I didn't know it did all the stuff the article talks about, but I'm not surprised.
One of the (many many many MANY) reasons I left the teaching program when I was in college was how hard all this spyware and adtech-operated management software was being pushed on staff and...
One of the (many many many MANY) reasons I left the teaching program when I was in college was how hard all this spyware and adtech-operated management software was being pushed on staff and students. Peeking into the system and seeing how much is sacrificed in the name of productivity and mimicking the workplace was simply disgusting. Give the kids a break.
Also, as someone who got flagged for being suicidal in high school (I believe as a result of some more primitive monitoring software) and harassed because of it, it goes beyond my general belief in a right to privacy. Even if I thought this sort of monitoring was acceptable in principle, schools by and large are not tight ships which can handle this information responsibly. Five minutes in any teacher's lounge in America will teach you that one.
This computer monitoring software is not a subject I know anything about, but the article links to the data and I think it's an important conversation to have. I can't verify that the conclusions...
This computer monitoring software is not a subject I know anything about, but the article links to the data and I think it's an important conversation to have. I can't verify that the conclusions in the article are correct.
I can easily believe that software designed for school leadership to monitor student behavior would be overly broad in its definition of objectionable behavior and search topics.
Teacher here.
I use GoGuardian on a regular basis.
I'll qualify what I'm about to say with the lead-in that I think student privacy is a major issue that needs to be dealt with. It sits right alongside (underneath?) broad digital privacy protections in general. People who know me here on Tildes know that I'm very protective of my own personal privacy, and I wish I lived in a country that made deliberate and meaningful efforts to support me in that. The way I feel about myself personally goes quadruple for my students, who are only kids and are much more vulnerable given that they've never lived in a world that hasn't tracked them.
With that said, I don't think this article is particularly helpful. In fact, I think it's counterproductive. It feels to me like it's a casualty of the now omnipresent need for internet content to shallowly stoke outrage rather than commit to more nuanced, in-depth analysis. The "Red Flag Quiz" they made and headings like "Replacing Social Workers with Big Brother" feel like they're made more for virality than for accurately depicting the actual landscape on which platforms like GoGuardian live.
For one, it's clear that the EFF didn't talk to any teachers before writing this. GoGuardian is exclusively characterized as a method of surveillance rather than a legitimate tool. Furthermore, it gets some basic information about GoGuardian just plain wrong. For example: what it calls "Scenes" are actually called "Sessions". A "Scene" is something you can apply within a "Session", so it's an easy mistake to make, but it feels really sloppy to me. Imagine reading an article complaining about, say, Windows, but the author kept mistakenly calling it "Microsoft Explorer". Their complaints would lose a lot of credibility.
My school started using GoGuardian, like so many other schools did, when the COVID pandemic hit. We had used it a bit in very limited contexts prior to the pandemic, but it didn't become an everyday, household name until schools shut down and all of our classes shifted online.
The reason for getting GoGuardian was not because we suddenly wanted to surveil our students from their homes. The reason for getting GoGuardian was because it would allow us to better instruct students from their homes.
To explain why, I have to talk a bit about modern teaching. I imagine many of us here, especially the older folks, have an image of teaching as someone sitting at a desk or standing in front of a class. That teacher talks to the class, conveys information, the students listen and write things down, and that's pretty much it.
This is not the case in modern education, particularly in the United States.
In my role as a teacher, I'm rarely lecturing or giving whole-class instruction. After I do, I'm not sitting at my desk for the rest of the period. I'm walking around the room, assessing students' progress and understanding, checking in with individual students, identifying pain points or misunderstandings with the material, answering questions, encouraging and directing peer collaboration, etc. It's continual, ongoing, individualized support, conferencing, and, yes, monitoring.
On a brief walk around my classroom, I'm not idly strolling -- I'm actively scanning the papers of the students in front of me:
I'm also continually acting on those in-the-moment observations, integrating them with my knowledge of the students, their abilities, and their work habits, and judging how best to intervene or support them if needed. One student might like direct pointers; another might prefer to work with a peer to clear up a misunderstanding. One student might be able to bounce back from an error, while another might be derailed by it.
Gone are the days of waiting until the test at the end of the unit to know if a student knows how to perform certain skills. How and what I do is continually informed by what's happening in the classroom on a moment-to-moment basis, with misconceptions and supports deployed almost instantaneously. At the end of any given class, I can pretty accurately tell you who learned what and who didn't. I can also identify areas of instruction for the following day: common misconceptions, edge cases, new or novel situations to integrate what they've learned, etc.
I know we have a lot of software developers here, and it's not an exact metaphorical fit, but modern teaching looks a lot more like the agile model of project management than the waterfall one.
Anyway, this has been the norm of what I do for as long as I've been in this career. It's so normal I don't even realize I'm doing it most of the time. It's second nature -- the life-sustaining oxygen in the room I'm not even aware that I'm breathing.
So then, something big happens: COVID hits.
And schools shut down.
Classrooms are empty. Kids are now tasked with learning from home.
What this means for me is that I no longer have a classroom to walk around in. The oxygen of my career -- evaluating and supporting student learning in the moment -- is suddenly gone.
I can't observe the papers on their desks because they're not at their desks. I can't check in on what they're doing in my class because they're literally not in my class. What I can do is broadcast myself via video to them, sitting at home. I can talk them through a lesson, showing them how to do something new. I can then let them try, giving them some practice problems and I... what? Sit there blankly staring at my webcam?
Am I back to the waterfall, chalk-and-talk model of teaching? Do I wait three weeks for the unit test to know if they've learned something?
GoGuardian was a useful tool during the pandemic because it replicated the in-person environment I was used to on the backdrop of an all-virtual distance learning setup. It let me see what my students were doing, in the moment. I could assign them work on a digital plaform, and then I could watch them do it, see their process, and address their misunderstandings on the fly.
It gave me my oxygen back.
GoGuardian has a built in chat feature. I used that constantly to message students individually, while they were working, helping them figure out new concepts and identify mistakes. I could use GoGuardian to video chat with groups of students, so I'd pull three or four kids who weren't getting it into their own private small group live help session. GoGuardian became my eyes for my students' work during COVID, as well as the way I could individually support them as they worked. It would have been impossible for me to see what they were doing and support them as individuals otherwise (Google Meet for example, which I also used regularly, launched with only global chat, meaning all messages could be read by everyone in a meeting, for example -- I hopefully don't need to explain how terrible this would be for a virtual classroom setting).
Now that we're out of COVID, I don't use GoGuardian as much. I'd much rather walk around my classroom and see things with my own eyes and have in-person conversations than digital chat-based ones, but I'd be lying if I said it wasn't still great for certain circumstances. Written assignments, in particular, are difficult to "scan" easily from a distance due to handwriting issues and the fact that if I stand over a student's shoulder to read their writing for a minute, it's excruciating for both me and that student.
If I pop on a GoGuardian session and have the students type their responses on their computers, however, it's trivial for me to bounce from screen to screen and check in on their progress. It is stunningly more efficient and less awkward than circulating the classroom.
Another teacher I work with runs our after-school virtual homework support program. Students can log in from home to ask questions and get help with their homework on any given night. She uses GoGuardian for that extensively. Helping the kids out would be nearly impossible without it.
I suppose you could distill down what we are doing to be the "surveillance" of students, but that characterization feels wrong to me because it implies a maliciousness that isn't really there, as well as a complete lack of appreciation for the genuine richness enabled by the practice. Doing what I do makes me a better teacher and helps my students learn better. I wouldn't be nearly as effective at what I did if I weren't continually "gathering data" by "monitoring" my students as they worked.
This is why I balk at the article's suggestion that GoGuardian is merely a surveillance platform. It was genuinely invaluable during the pandemic shutdowns, and it remains valuable today, though it's less essential than it was.
This is to say nothing of the other things it offers, particularly site blocking. @Wolf_359 discusses it in their comment here, but handing kids a device with unfettered access to the internet and expecting them to remain focused and on-task through sheer willpower is not developmentally appropriate.
I can't speak in detail to the higher-level GoGuardian functions like Beacon that are brought up. These are quite literally "above" me in that I don't have access to them. It's my understanding that these are "always on" for student devices, which is very different from what I get. This article makes it sound like teachers are willingly putting students in panopticons, but that's not the case. The only way I get information on my students is by choosing to open a Session during which I can see their screens, view their open tabs, chat with them, and see a timeline of their active tabs. When the Session closes, that data stream stops for me, and I have no access to anything of theirs. I am only provided with data when I actively initiate it, and I don't get any content warnings from that view. Those, from Beacon, only go to administrators and counselors (as far as I know).
When I do open a Session, students are notified on their devices that there's an active GoGuardian session, so they are aware that a teacher is monitoring them. If I were to turn on a Session outside of school hours, I'd likely see nothing because I only get information if the student's Chromebook is on and active (and with how few of my students do homework, I'm assuming that their laptops don't open again until the moment they walk back in the school's doors the next morning).
The other big omission this article makes is that GoGuardian tracks student behavior on school devices. When the article says that administrators "have nearly unfettered access to huge amounts of data about students, including browsing histories, documents, videos, app and extension data, and content filtering and alerts", it makes it sound like the entire student's digital life is up for view. The truth is that GoGuardian isn't showing me what they looked up on their phones or their home computers -- it's showing only what they looked up on their school-issued Chromebooks.
Granted, this is still a privacy concern, especially because kids, developmentally, aren't in a place where they can fully separate out their "work" and "personal" selves, but it's not nearly as invasive as it sounds either. I think we all acknowledge (and are generally quite comfortable with) the expectation that our work devices are not ours and that we aren't guaranteed privacy on them. I actively talk with my students about exactly this. Their Chromebooks are not their hardware; they're not on their own network; their purpose is not for personal use. I talk about how I don't do any personal stuff on my work laptop and how the IT department for our district can see everything I do including view my search history and read my emails. I tell them how I limit my personal stuff to my personal devices, and I don't put those on my school's network.
And then I talk with them about how, even on their personal devices, they aren't getting privacy anyway because Google and Facebook and Snapchat are tracking everything they do too. This is where my students stop listening because I sound like an old man quite literally yelling at the cloud and also the quickest way to for me to sound out of touch is to make TikTok sound like its anything but the best, most exciting thing in the world.
Anyway, I've said a lot, but the article feels fear-mongery to me in a bad way. My biggest problem is that I feel like it commits pretty big lies of omission about what GoGuardian actually does. I also feel like its complaints come across more as provocations rather than from a place of legitimate concern. As a beleaguered teacher, I’ve read way too many articles rabble rousing about problems with education and very few that seem interested in genuinely solving them or even diving below the surface to attempt to explain why those issues came about in the first place. It gets tiring being an endless political and social football. We’re starving for solutions in education but people only seem to write about us when they want to get people mad.
I'm someone who wants better privacy protection for everyone, students especially, but this article leaves me with no other takeaways on that front than "be mad at GoGuardian". That doesn't sit right with me, because, as a teacher, I believe it is a legitimately useful educational tool.
This is an incredible comment and some great lived experience. Would you mind if I shared some of your thoughts with my coworkers at GG? I don't work on Teacher but I know some of the people on the product team that would love to hear what you had to say.
Not at all. Go for it!
I also appreciate you asking for permission. Thanks for being so considerate.
The only thing I don’t want is my handle here to suddenly end up in some sort of wider spotlight. I’m able to speak as candidly as I do here entirely because I’m an internet nobody and this has no connection to my real identity. Not saying they would or anything, but I’d prefer if my words didn’t end up on X or Instagram or anything like that with wide reach.
Also, on a related note, please don’t use any of it for marketing! Again, not saying y’all would, but I had a bad experience with another edtech company using feedback I gave them in marketing copy without my consent. I wasn’t very happy about that one.
Instead of unloading my cynical side to you like I’m doing right now though, what I should be saying instead is thank you for the kind words and the useful product you make!
Thank you.
Are there free periodicals you like that report on the education sector? My rss has room for more sources.
I appreciate the feeling that went into your answer and I don't want to sound blase. I did hope the article would spark strong discussion. But I am now less likely to post anything from the EFF directly in future. As you say, there were errors in the article and sloppiness. I share some, not all, priorities with EFF, but I want to deal with thoughtful, thorough research, especially when making controversial arguments.
EdWeek is the only one I know of off the top of my head. The caveat is that this isn’t an endorsement of it, because I genuinely don’t know how it is. I don’t really follow educational news. I already live enough of it!
As for the EFF, while I was harsh on this article, I don’t think they should be judged entirely by it. I’m a big fan of not distilling large, complex things into single moments or angles, and from what I understand the EFF is generally well received and respected. It’s likely this article was simply a misstep more than indicative of any larger pattern (though, like with EdWeek, I genuinely don’t know — I don’t follow them either!).
My wife (a former teacher) is currently finishing up an MA in Information Science. She's doing a piece around digital literacy and she's starting to talk quite loudly about systems like these.
Rather than actually educate kids (who later becoming funtioning people) on how to use the internet to look after yourself, what to avoid and how to disemble crap information. We end up with adminstrators / MPs / political-figures smashing huge sums of money into draconian tools like this to "keep kids safe."
Actually giving people skills keeps them safe. Giving them safe spaces, keeps them safe. Storing ALL their personal data in a third party? Yeah... not so much it turns out.
Edit this has been denied by someone who claims to work there. I am leaving it up to provide context.
I found this particularly egregious. If it were widely known I think parents would object.
This isn't true, and its bad reporting on the part of the journalist. What they were talking about was a vulnerability with Google meet which was patched very quickly, not an intended feature.
Source: I work at GoGuardian
Good to know, thank you.
The larger conversation about this type of software is worth having but I don't want to spread misinformation. I think I'm going to leave the quote to add context to your denial. Otherwise people will just find it in the article and believe it.
To add on to what @OBLIVIATER shared, it happened during the beginning of the COVID pandemic when schools were unexpectedly shut down and had to pivot to using software that was rushed out the door by companies trying to meet demands for virtual conferencing. Early Google Meet was a rough product, and even the more mature Zoom at the time had major issues with things like “Zoombombings”.
It’s not to say that there aren’t issues or concerns in these areas, but this particular example isn’t representative and is highly inflammatory absent context.
Honestly? Given how many people have Alexa, GoogleHubs and such at home? I'd doubt it. People happily give away freedom and privacy for sheer convenience. Privacy is just something you need if you're upto something shady, right?
I'm not so sure. If you know that your teacher, someone who had direct contact with your child, could at a moments notice watch them through the webcam...I think a lot of Karen's would freak out...
It'll bother some folks aye. But I suspect others will just see it as a disciplinary function.
People are easily placated over things like this.
Also, concerned parents wouldn't be a 'Karen'.
I'm honestly surprised this alone didn't torpedo the whole thing. That is beyond the pale.
Sorry everyone, but as a teacher we really need a monitoring software. Kids don't have executive functioning skills and they have zero self-control when it comes to choosing between games and classwork. This is true 100x more now that most special ed. classes are integrated and the ADHD kiddos are in general ed. classrooms. I'm very pro-integration as a special ed. teacher, but truly, it's better for everyone in that room if Johnny ADHD can't play games and Susan Autism can't read manga. I make this joke with immense love for my special ed. kiddos. But it really can throw the whole room off!
Even adults have this issue. How many of us have opened up Steam (or Tildes!) for "just a few minutes" when we should be getting something done at work or home?
In addition, kids are dealing with bullying, self-harm, drugs, etc. When this happens online, we often have no window into these issues until it's too late. Luckily, many kids are naive enough to Google it while using their school computer during second period. There have been several times where I've forwarded kiddos to a social worker because of their computer usage.
Now, if only GoGuardian could protect the computers from physical damage. Man, you wouldn't believe some of the laptops I've seen. The boys just punch them and throw them, the girls have makeup and glitter caked into the keyboard. And our school's solution is that if you break a new laptop, you get one of the older, barely functioning models. In other words, the kids who need the least resistance between them and learning often have the shittiest laptops with the most problems. Makes my life hard when a kid has a legitimate excuse for not getting an assignment done - for example, if their old laptop literally won't open the assignment or connect to the Internet.
I appreciate your expert opinion. What do you propose should be done re lgbt kids, or kids who may be dealing with pregancy, especially in red states or conservative countries? Also, perhaps the tech people here can assist, but there are reports that data collected can be deanonymized by third parties, or just hacked.
When I was in high school, I just assumed the computer lab computers were able to monitor anything I was doing on them already. As long as this is only used on school-provided computers, I don’t really see how it’s any different.
Sure, there are privacy concerns, but that’s why I wouldn’t use it for anything non-school related. If the computer is off, and I’m not using it, there’s no data to be had from it.
I think the best place to look something up “anonymously” would be in the computer lab at a library (not at school), using a guest account. Which is (one of the reasons) why I’m an ardent supporter of public libraries.
As someone who works for GoGuardian, I have a pretty alternative viewpoint on this, but I guess that's just my bias
I know you don't represent the company, but as another teacher who uses it every day, I just want to say
Thank you guys for being the only thing standing between me and students playing games nonstop on their computers (something even adults have trouble with at work and at home when they're supposed to be productive)
GG needs to up their game just a little bit! We had a different monitoring software that worked incredibly well and then just stopped working completely after several years. We switched to GG and the number of times that a kid is inexplicably not showing up as online is infuriating! They will be playing a game and I'll tell them to get off it. The smart ones say, "okay, sorry," and then wait to see if I can actually close them out. If I can't they just try to sneak the game when I'm not looking. Ugh! Haha.
If I was on the product team I'd be able to give you an explanation, but unfortunately I don't have much insight into that. I will suggest you reach out to our support team if you are having continuous issues, they're good people and will try their best to help out.
Can you share? Are you willing?
GoGuardian is only supposed to be used on school issued devices, schools have a lot of liability on what happens on the school's property meaning they are legally required to have software with similar functions to GoGuardian. Students are made aware of what GoGuardian does and how it works, and they are warned not to use school property for improper things, or even personal use at all.
This really isn't different from using the computer lab at school to do things you aren't supposed to. You're going to get caught and get in trouble for looking up porn or playing games during classes.
Also the writers stance on Beacon is pretty grim even for this article. This line in particular was frustrating
Our "anecdotal evidence" is proven by data in our system and by school administrators providing testimonials, whereas their "research" is not cited at all and they likely didn't even have any access to the system to even perform a proper study. I believe this is dishonest at best, and downright misinformation at worse.
First of all, Beacon is never advertised as a replacement for social workers or mental health professionals, its advertised as a tool to help alert when children are struggling, if a school decides to use it in leu of proper healthcare that's not something we can control or even encourage. We have many testimonies from dozens of schools and social workers who all swear that Beacon saved children's lives and that they have students who have thanked them for stepping in and helping them during a huge struggle in their lives.
At the end of the day my viewpoint is this, you shouldn't expect to use school property like your own personal device without concessions that the school has to cover its ass. I guarantee you there are a lot more parents out there that support the use of software like GoGuardian provides than have issues with it, like it or not, this is something that schools require these days.
Edit: This is not the official stance of the company, I do not speak for the company, I am not in a position of influence for decisions for the company. I'm a ground level employee who's been there for 4 years and seen these scaremongering stories come and go many times.
But if students are getting reported (and thus potentially getting in trouble) for doing benign things like college applications, counseling and therapy sites, and sites with information about LGBT issues, that's not harmless. Even if flagged activity is manually reviewed by school admins before it goes any further, those latter two mean that this alone could cause massive harm to closeted students in the US in states where parents and/or school admins aren't (or can't be) on their side.
EDIT TO ADD: Worth noting that the above concerns are not hypothetical, as reported in this article about troubles with Gaggle, a competitor in the space. This article was linked in the EFF's report.
I work in a vaguely similar field (I'm in data science and my company sells software that monitors employee communication for legal and compliance issues) so I completely get how impossible it is to completely eliminate false positives. But certain types of false positives have a disproportionate potential to cause harm, and unless EFF is straight-up lying about the types of sites that are flagged, there's definitely stuff that gives me pause here.
If a student gets in trouble for doing college applications/counseling/therapy I'm not sure how that's anything but a terrible reflection on the teacher/administration. GoGuardian is a tool, if its being used stupidly there's not much you can do about it. While its possible to flag something like that, its not like GoGuardian takes action on its own, it simply alerts a person as to the behavior, if the person looks at the site and thinks its harmful (which I don't think any sane person would) that's their choice. I will say there was a big internal push a few years back by LGBT resource groups to make sure our systems aren't alerting on potentially damaging content, and we've seen a lot of improvement in that field.
As for the Gaggle point, I can't speak much to it since I don't work for Gaggle, but I've long since had a lot of disdain for that company. They don't take privacy seriously like we do, they high 3rd party contractors to review student alerts, and they have pretty shady marketing.
Thank you for adding context. Issues like this are complex and nuanced. But I am worried for pregnant teens and gay teens, especially in certain US states.
I share your concern to a certain extent. I believe the path forward is better funding for the education system and training to make sure that things like this aren't a threat to student's safety. Unfortunately right now we're in a very tumultuous time in the United States, and safety from threats and suicide is more prevalent on people's minds than privacy and autonomy.
In a perfect world I wish something like this didn't have to exist, but for the world we live in right now, I'm glad it does.
Issues with underage people always have to balance protection with freedom, but especially with teens the issues become difficult. Thank you for sharing your perspective.
I have nothing close to enough understanding to draw conclusions either way on this - I hadn’t even heard of the software until this conversation - but they do cite their sources and methodology in detail here: https://redflagmachine.com/research/#smarter-goguardian-smart-alerts-and-beacon
[Edit] Fixed URL fragment
Smart alerts were depreciated years ago, we've been using Beacon since 2020. It appears his data is outdated.
For the beacon section they said they only got data from two school districts, and even then we're only provided a few sample alerts, hardly conclusive research. I don't believe they have enough data to support their claims
Fascinating. I'm a teacher that uses GoGuardian every day, but I exclusively use it for its whitelist ability, so that I know the kids are using the chromebook for class stuff. I didn't know it did all the stuff the article talks about, but I'm not surprised.
One of the (many many many MANY) reasons I left the teaching program when I was in college was how hard all this spyware and adtech-operated management software was being pushed on staff and students. Peeking into the system and seeing how much is sacrificed in the name of productivity and mimicking the workplace was simply disgusting. Give the kids a break.
Also, as someone who got flagged for being suicidal in high school (I believe as a result of some more primitive monitoring software) and harassed because of it, it goes beyond my general belief in a right to privacy. Even if I thought this sort of monitoring was acceptable in principle, schools by and large are not tight ships which can handle this information responsibly. Five minutes in any teacher's lounge in America will teach you that one.
This computer monitoring software is not a subject I know anything about, but the article links to the data and I think it's an important conversation to have. I can't verify that the conclusions in the article are correct.
I can easily believe that software designed for school leadership to monitor student behavior would be overly broad in its definition of objectionable behavior and search topics.