Children around the world and Canada who used online educational technology during the pandemic were secretly collected personal data and sent to advertising companies, according to a new report published by Human Rights Watch.
According to the report, these online educational products had the capacity to monitor children and collect data on who they are, where they are, what they do in the classroom, who their family and friends are, and what devices their families may be. to allow them to use. “
“Swarm of Invisible Trackers”
Sometimes, the moment a child accessed their online learning website, “they were surrounded by a swarm of invisible trackers,” said He Jung Khan, author of the report and researcher in the Human Rights Watch (HRW) Department of Children’s Rights.
“The equivalent would be a child sitting in a physical classroom with a surveillance camera trained on them to film every time the child scratches his nose,” she said.
HRW said it was investigating online learning platforms approved by 49 governments, including Canada, to educate children during the pandemic between March and August 2021.
Of the 164 online learning products tested, nearly 90 percent were found to “risk or violate children’s rights and children’s privacy in one way or another,” Hahn said.
Parents cannot protect their child from these trackers unless they throw their child’s device in the trash, said report author He Jung Khan. (Ollie Scarf / AFP via Getty Images)
The CBC Kids educational website was cited in the report as a case study and was named as one of the eight websites that are “canvas fingerprinting” – a method of tracking users’ activities on the Internet. The report found that a total of 20 advertising and marketing companies received data on children from CBC Kids.
HRW notes that the site is recommended by the Quebec Ministry of Education for preschool and primary school children.
But the public operator rejected the report’s findings.
“While we applaud the work of what Human Rights Watch is doing to protect children, we respectfully called us wrong,” said CBC spokesman Chuck Thompson.
“Simply put, we do not, do not collect and will not collect or share child data with any third-party advertising trackers.
According to the report, most educational technology companies have not disclosed their monitoring of children through their data, and most online learning platforms have installed tracking technologies that lead children outside of their virtual classrooms to other applications and websites on the Internet.
“Extremely sensitive information”
Khan said some training apps, if they have access to accurate child location data, can find out where children live or spend most of their time, whether in the living room or bedrooms.
“So this is extremely sensitive information that can be exposed to abuse and exploitation,” she said.
Some of the tracking and surveillance practices were “so insidious and so stubborn,” Hahn said, “there was really no way to protect your child from these trackers unless you threw your child’s device in the trash.”
She said most of the data is sent to advertising technology companies, a kind of “intermediary” that then sells to advertisers who want to target children.
These companies, according to the HRW report, could analyze the data to guess the child’s personal characteristics and interests and predict what the child might do next and how it might be influenced.
Matthew Johnson, director of education at MediaSmarts, an Ottawa-based digital media literacy center, said he went to the CBC Kids website and found a “surprising amount of data collection” happening there.
But he said the biggest concern was collecting data on students in learning management systems in general.
“Now that students are back in school, this really gives us a closer look at how learning management systems and educational websites and applications more broadly collect and use data for students,” he said.
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