Andrew is enjoying a well-deserved break this week, and has given me (Jan Kooy) the Daily Brief reins.
Imagine you're a child, and the school you go to uses educational websites that harvested your personal data.
These websites not only watch you in online classrooms, but also follow you across the internet, outside school hours, and deep into your private live.
Would this be ok for you?
I don't think so, and neither does Human Rights Watch.
For some time now, HRW has been campaigning against these practices (you can join our campaign here). The overwhelming majority of education technology (EdTech) products endorsed by 49 governments of the world’s most populous countries appear to have surveilled or had the capacity to surveil children in ways that risked or infringed on their rights. Last year HRW released technical evidence on 163 EdTech products recommended for children’s learning during the pandemic.
Today we published new research, focusing on Brazil, and are calling on companies and governments to stop their data surveillance of children, and set up legal safeguards to protect children online. The national government should amend Brazil’s data protection law by adding new safeguards to protect children online.
“Children and their families in Brazil are being kept in the dark about the data surveillance conducted on children in online classrooms,” writes my colleague Hye Jung Han, an HRW expert on children’s rights and technology. “Instead of protecting children, state governments have willfully enabled anyone to surveil them and collect their personal information online.”
In response to an earlier investigation, the education secretariat of the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais promptly removed all ad tracking from its website. This shows it’s possible to build and offer educational services for children that do not compromise their data and their privacy.
More governments in Brazil, and other countries, should follow this example.