Globe & Mail;

Millions of students in Canada and around the world had their personal information sent to advertisers and data brokers when governments made an abrupt switch to online learning during the pandemic, according to a new report that reveals safety gaps in educational technology.

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CBC Kids, an educational website run by Canada’s public broadcaster, is used as a global case study in the [Human Rights Watch] report, because of how particularly “egregious” the site was in its data-collection practices.

It’s a long report, so I’ve pulled a few paragraphs that stand out.

Across the country, when COVID-19 swept onto Canadian shores in March, 2020, students were forced into online classrooms. Governments turned to educational apps and websites. This gave international corporations that produce this technology an opportunity to tap into the habits of a young captive audience for an extended period of time.

These companies began to collect personal data from children, according to HRW’s research and findings. This included information about who children were, where they were located, what they did in their classrooms, who their family members and friends were and what kinds of devices their caregivers could afford to buy them. If a student searched for something online, doodled on a virtual whiteboard or visited a non-school-related website, that data could be collected.

Most of this was done through tracking technology built into or included with educational apps and websites. With these techniques, which are commonly used by online marketers to build profiles of customers, some educational platforms were able to trail children outside of their virtual classrooms and across the internet, HRW found.

Other ways of collecting children’s data included invisibly tagging them, so that their digital trail was difficult to get rid of. This tracking technique, which is also often used on commercial websites, is particularly invasive when applied to students, HRW said. It works by drawing hidden shapes and text on a webpage that can be connected to a unique numeric identifier for a user’s device. Users cannot eliminate this type of tracking through any ad-blocking software, or by adjusting their web browser privacy settings.

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According to the findings, CBC Kids used 29 trackers to collect data and sent it to 20 advertising companies. CBC Kids also used 15 third-party cookies to send further data to nine advertising technology companies, HRW found. That’s more than five times the median number of cookies and more than four times the median number of trackers installed on the world’s most popular websites.

In its privacy policy, CBC Kids says, “The vast majority of the information you create doesn’t have any indicator of who you are, personally.” But HRW found that CBC Kids had been sending children’s data to companies that publicly say they connect people’s offline identity records to their online activities.

One would think that a report this explosive would merit a stronger headline.