Schools nationwide have increasingly relied on technological tools that purport to keep kids safe, yet there’s a dearth of independent research to back up their claims that these tools are effective. Patterson, who has watched his business grow by more than 20% during Covid-19, said Gaggle could be part of the solution. Though the pandemic’s effects on suicide rates remains fuzzy, suicide has been a leading cause of death among teenagers for years. Minneapolis school officials make similar assertions. Those figures have not been independently verified. Gaggle executives maintain that the system saves lives, including those of more than 1,400 youth during the 2020-21 school year. The private company also captured their journal entries, fictional stories and classroom assignments. In Minneapolis, Gaggle flagged students for keywords related to pornography, suicide and violence, according to six months of incident reports obtained by The 74 through a public records request.
The remote moderators evaluate flagged materials and notify school officials about content they find troubling. The tool scans students’ emails, chat messages and other documents, including class assignments and personal files, in search of keywords, images or videos that could indicate self-harm, violence or sexual behavior. Through AI and the content moderator team, Gaggle tracks students’ online behavior every day by analyzing materials on their school-issued Google and Microsoft accounts. Minneapolis Public Schools first contracted with Gaggle in the spring of 2020 as the pandemic forced students nationwide into remote learning. Jeff Patterson, Gaggle’s founder and CEO, said in a statement his company does not “make a judgement on that level of the context”, and it’s ultimately up to school administrators to “decide the proper response, if any”. “Now, when I’ve made it clear that I’m a lot better, the school is contacting my counselor and is freaking out.” “I was trying to be vulnerable with this teacher and be like, ‘Hey, here’s a thing that’s important to me because you asked,” Logsdon-Wallace said. The meaning of the classroom assignment – that his mental health had improved – was seemingly lost in the transaction between Gaggle and the school district. In mid-September, a school counselor called Logsdon-Wallace’s mother to let her know the system flagged him for using the word “suicide”. In an earlier investigation, the non-profit website The 74 analyzed nearly 1,300 public records from Minneapolis Public Schools to expose how Gaggle subjects students to relentless, round-the-clock digital surveillance, raising significant privacy concerns for more than 5 million young people across the country who are monitored by the company’s algorithm and human content moderators.īut technology experts and families with first-hand experience with Gaggle’s surveillance dragnet have raised another issue: the service is not only invasive it may also be ineffective. The classroom assignment was one of thousands of Minneapolis student communications that got flagged by Gaggle, a digital surveillance company that saw rapid growth after the pandemic forced schools into remote learning. Photograph: (Photo courtesy Teeth Logsdon-Wallace) The assignment was flagged by the student surveillance company Gaggle. In a classroom assignment, Teeth Logsdon-Wallace explained how a Ramshackle Glory song helped him cope after he tried to kill himself.