Apps For Kids
Dangerous data brokers will pay top dollar to know how well your kid can recite the alphabet on their iPad. Just sign the permission slip, Dad.
America’s schoolteachers are overworked. Class sizes are too big, and the demands on teachers are too high. You don’t need to watch Abbot Elementary to know this (but you should because that show is great).
The people who take care of our children, moreover, do not make a good enough living. They’re underpaid. Obviously, they deserve not only our support and sympathy. They also should, at a minimum, have access to the best teaching methods and innovative technologies that can help them manage their heavy workloads.
In short, teachers should have the autonomy to run their classrooms according to their expertise and experience. That includes the use of iPads, TVs, radios—whatever technology helps teachers get through the day. If chatGPT ends up providing some useful pedagogical tools, and teachers want to use it, who am I to tell them that chatGPT should be banned just like a controversial book?1
What I’m trying to say is that teachers are not at fault for bringing dangerous “educational” apps into their classrooms. The people at fault for endangering our kids are the tech CEOs and “edupreneurs” who are making big money by selling out America’s schoolkids, through adorable iPad apps like “Teach Your Monster to Read.” These for-profit companies have marketed themselves to teachers and parents for years, and now more than ever, they are entrenched in America’s schools.
These “educational” apps are sucking up precious and intimate details about our kids. They’re storing millions of photos and videos of our kids. And they’re doing it in order to make money, not to provide some valuable educational service.
Wait, Are “Educational” Apps and iPads in Schools Really That Bad?
To quote the industry magazine EdSurge: “hook em young!” (Yikes! They really said the quiet part out loud there.)
Yes—the goal of many for-profit “EdTech” companies is to get their apps in front of very young children as often as possible, to then take advantage of data gathering and other shady business practices to maximize their profits. This is not news. Alarm bells about the money hose flowing from Silicon Valley venture capital and into K-12 schools started ringing nearly a decade ago.
The biggest problem with these for-profit “educational” apps is how they abuse the trust of teachers and parents to earn profits. Especially since the pandemic, the rapidly growing “EdTech” sector has swooped in to offer hundreds of cute-looking apps supposedly perfect for the “remote learning” era. Many of these apps endanger the safety and privacy of kids in schools across the US.
Yes, these are “just kid’s apps.” What’s the big deal? Well, the dangers with apps start with data breaches that routinely expose private information about kids (e.g. health records, home addresses, photos). The harms extend to allowing shady data brokers to build highly detailed “behavioral profiles” of young children. Advertisers love behavioral profiles, which they believe will help them target ads to exactly the right individual people. These data brokers follow children as they grow up, honing their behavioral profiles, making them highly valuable to advertisers of all kinds. The potential for huge profits made by taking advantage of a captive audience of kids in a classroom can, potentially, lead to a Roblox-like situation. Roblox (the game company, don’t worry it’s “just a kid’s app”) has been accused of financially exploiting children (and worse).
This is a big deal. Big enough that California passed a new “Children’s Privacy and Safety Law” in September 2022. If “EdTech” was so innocent, then why are they fighiting this new regulation? A bunch of tech companies filed a lawsuit against the State of California last month to block the new law, even though it won’t take effect until 2024. There are billions of profits at stake over these “kids apps.” What’s more important, your kid’s safety or billions of dollars? “Hook ‘em young!”
Don’t They Need A Permission Slip?
The idea in the U.S. is that it’s up to individual parents to protect their kids from corporations. See, parents get permission slips. If you’re concerned, then don’t sign the permission slip. Problem solved!
OK — let me tell you what it was like for me, the father of a young kid, who tried to say no to a permission slip for an “EdTech” company that my kid’s school started using back in 2021.
Right, so one of the things no one tells you about parenting is that that kids come with a lot of paperwork and other assorted bureaucratic nonsense. Doctors forms, tax forms, and yes, school forms. Field trip. Fundraiser. Movie showing. There’s a near-constant stream of these—just a routine part of parenting. Within about five minutes of the first time you hold your newborn baby in your arms, you get to sign your very first documents. The first five or six times you get a form to sign, you might ask some questions, but after the three hundreth form, you kinda just start signing them without even reading them.
One day in 2021, just as COVID lockdowns eased up a bit, I received one of these ubiquitous permission slips to sign from my kid’s preschool. My spouse was, understandably, ready to just sign it and forget it, like we do with 99% of these things. But this one caught my attention.
The title was “Family Communication Program Introduction Letter.” It immediately went on to apologize for the sexist name of this app, “HiMama,” by saying “We want you to know that the program name, HiMama, does not in any way reflect what [our school] holds as a representation of a family and our commitment to being all inclusive.”
Right.
Long story short, after spending thirty seconds reading the privacy policy of this “HiMama” company, I learned that it openly admits to sharing data with all of your favorite advertising companies: Google, Amazon, Twitter, and Facebook. Because my kid was going to “graduate” from preschool in only about eight weeks, I decided that we shouldn’t sign this permission slip (“participation agreement”). After all, the point of a permission slip was that we could “just say no,” right?
Not right.
After weeks of pressure from my kid’s teacher, I eventually sat with the principal of the school to discuss my reservations in detail. My refusal to sign the permission slip had caused a major problem for my kid’s teachers, and I felt badly that they had to spend their precious time and energy to figure out how to manage my objections to what they saw as a necessary and helpful communications tool. I’ll tell the full story about this moment later in this newsletter series. For now, I’ll just tell you that principal of the preschool was pretty much spot on when she warned me that after my kid left preschool, and went to kindergarten, there would be far more than just “permission slips” for apps. HiMama, she said, would only be the beginning. She was right.
After COVID, They Don’t Even Bother With Permission Slips Any More
A few months later, my kid enrolled at our neighborhood’s public school for kindergarten after COVID lockdowns had all but become a thing of the past. At least at my kid’s school (and probably yours if you’re in the US), boy howdy did EdTech take off like a rocket in the early 2020s. It makes sense. Teachers needed to find ways to make their jobs more manageable amidst the COVID crisis, and these cheerful and super-user-friendly apps were ready to go, right then and there. Just download the app, and you’re off.
By the end of the first week of kindergarten, my kid came home with a school-issued iPad and a bespoke “folder of information” that contained usernames and passwords for about ten accounts for the various “EdTech” apps and services that my child would use as part of her work in kindergarten.
Ten. Online. Accounts. For kindergarten.
You think I’m kidding? Here’s the list.
1. Apple ID (Apple, Inc.)
2. Seesaw (Seesaw)
3. Scholastic Book Club (Scholastic)
4. Kids A-Z App (Learning A-Z via salesforce.com)
5. Splash Learn (Studypad, Inc.)
6. Teach Your Monster To Read (Teach Your Monster, Ltd)
7. Zoom (Zoom Video Communications, Inc.)
8. Epic School (Epic Creations, Inc.)
9. PowerSchool (PowerSchool Group, LLC)
10. SchoolCafe (Cybersoft Technologies, Inc.)
Not included in my kid’s “folder of information,” but suggested by our local school district, were yet more apps including “First Words Sampler by Learning Touch LLC,” and “Moose Math,” and “Khan Academy Kids.” In fact, the district recommended that “Parents and Guardians should check back regularly at this URL to stay up to date on the latest apps and websites approved for use across the district.”
Yeah. I’m the nerdiest nerd for privacy policies that you’ll ever meet, and there is no way that I, every few weeks or so, will patiently click through the more than ONE HUNDRED privacy policies that my kid’s school district says I should “stay up to date” on.
Privacy Policies Are Not Protecting Our Kids From Data Sharks
Let’s just take a look at one of these privacy statements, for just a minute, shall we? I promise I won’t make you read the whole thing. It’ll only take a second.
Alright, then. How about Teach Your Monster To Read, from the UK-based company Teach Your Monster. Ooh look, it’s from a foundation! The Usborne Foundation! Maybe it’s a non-profi—nope it’s owned by a for-profit publisher that uses multi-level marketing. Oh, my.
Well, at least it’s British so it has to comply with stricter privacy regulations than the weaksauce that we have over here in the States, right? There is no way, for example, that the Usborne company is going to share personal information with shady data brokers. That wouldn’t be allowed in the United Kin—“in our capacity as data controller we will share your personal information with third parties… [including] the following: Intercom, Xplenty, Google, Xero, Trello, Apple, Dropbox, Storm, 8 Wires, New Relic, Hotjar, Amazon, Papertrail.”
Papertrail?! Papertrail. Yes, “Teach Your Monster To Read” is sharing personal data of children with companies including “Papertrail.”
Sure, no problem. What could go wrong? It’s not like one of these apps has been hacked to send out pornography. Wait, I’m being told that a porno hack actually did happen? Just a few months ago in September 2022? With one of the apps my kid uses? Thanks a lot, Seesaw.
What Should We Do?
I’m not about to suggest that we go back to the 1980s, or that things were better when I was a kid, so why can’t we just turn the iPads off and go back to reading books like we did back in my day. Et cetera. I mean, that sounds nice, but teachers have the hardest job in the world. They need support, they’re not getting support from their bosses, they’re not getting support from the government, and after all, technology is a necessary and potentially very beneficial part of education. Furthermore, I’m not trying to call out any individual educator, and I don’t think my kid’s schools have been especially bad with technology. I just want to understand just what’s going on, and I want to look at some solutions that many advocates and experts have already suggested.
For this special series, my little Love Letter to Apps in Schools, I’m going to look at why we need stronger regulations on data brokers, and why we need especially strong protections for children’s data. Then, I’ll look at the completely useless current regulations that have allowed these shady EdTech companies to swoop in and sell data about kids all over the place. In the final part of this four part series, I’ll look closely at the ideas proposed by progressive legislators and non-profit advocacy groups to get this situation under control, and I’ll look at practical steps that parents and teachers can take right now.
If you’ve got stories, ideas, or just want to vent about how ridiculous this is, please hit the comments section below. Thanks for joining me on this little journey. I promise I’ll keep the “in my day, it was better” and “uphill both ways” commentary to a minimum. Here we go.
This is not a story about chatGPT. But if you’re interested, I could write you a story about chatGPT. Or, maybe I’ll ask chatGPT to write you a story about chatGPT. Yeah. That’s enough of that.