In 2022, student privacy gets a solid “C” grade. The trend of schools engaging in student surveillance did not let up in 2022. There were, however, some small wins indicative of a growing movement to push back against this encroachment. Unfortunately, more schools than ever are spying on students through EdTech software and other means.
In an important decision by a federal judge, a remote proctoring “room scan” by a public university – Cleveland State University in Ohio – was deemed an unreasonable search under the Fourth Amendment. “Room scans,” where students are forced to use their device’s camera to give a 360-degree view of everything around the area in which they’re taking a test, are one of the most invasive aspects of remotely proctored exams. Often, these scans are done in a personal residence, and frequently a private space, like a bedroom.
The district court recognized that room scans provide the government (public schools are government entities) with a window into our homes—a space that “lies at the core of the Fourth Amendment’s protections” and long-recognized by the Supreme Court as private. There are few exceptions to this requirement, and none of the justifications offered by the university—including its interests in deterring cheating and its assertion the student may have been able to refuse the scan—sufficed to outweigh the student’s privacy interest in this case. Though this decision isn’t binding on other courts, any student of a state school hoping to push back against room scans in particular could now cite it as persuasive precedent. The school is expected to appeal to the Sixth Circuit.
EFF began looking more closely at student activity monitoring software, which is basically indistinguishable from spyware, and is used to filter, block, and flag vast amounts of student activity on their school-issued, and sometimes personal, devices. We already know that the
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