I missed this great Markup piece when it was published last November. It tells the story of dorm-to-classroom surveillance through the lens of a California college student:
By the time Natividad went to bed that night, Google and Facebook had data about which Mt. SAC webpages he’d visited, and a company called Instructure had gathered information for his professors about how much time he’d spent looking at readings for his classes and whether he had read messages about his courses. Campus police and a company called T2 Systems potentially had information about what kind of car he was driving and where he parked. And as he drifted off to sleep, Natividad had to contend with the worry that, later this semester, his professors could subject him to the facial detection software incorporated into the remote proctoring tools used at Mt. SAC.
The Markup story touches on textbook surveillance:
This semester, one of Natividad’s professors assigned a digital textbook through Cengage, a publishing company turned ed tech behemoth. […] According to Cengage’s online privacy policy, the company collects information about a student’s internet network and the device they use to access online textbooks as well as webpages viewed, links clicked, keystrokes typed, and movement of their mouse on the screen, among other things. The company then shares some of that data with third parties for targeted advertising. For students who sign into Cengage websites with their social media accounts, the company collects additional information about them and their entire social networks.
The Markup story might have added: When a student turns to research a term paper, they’re also being tracked there. Surveillance publishers like Elsevier harvest a shocking amount of data through their article-delivery platforms. Your journals, to paraphrase Sarah Lamdan, are spying on you.