One of the more dangerous features of student monitoring tools like GoGuardian, Gaggle, and Bark is their “flagging” functionality. The tools can scan web pages, documents in students’ cloud drives, emails, video content, and more for keywords about topics like sex, drugs, and violence. They then either block or flag this content for review by school administrators.
But in practice, these flags don’t work very well—many of the terms flagged by these student monitoring applications are often ambiguous, implicating whole swathes of the net that contain benign content. Worse still, these tools can alert teachers or parents to content that indicates something highly personal about the student—like the phrase “am I gay”—in a context that implies such a phrase is dangerous. Numerous reports show that the regular flagging of LGBTQ+ content creates a harmful atmosphere for students, some of whom have been outed because of it. This is particularly problematic when school personnel or family members do not understand or support a queer identity.
We call on all student monitoring tools to remove LGBTQ+ terms from their blocking and flagging lists
Thankfully, some student monitoring software companies have heard the concerns of students and civil liberties groups. Gaggle recently removed LGBTQ+ terms from their keyword list, and GoGuardian has done the same, per our correspondence with the company. We commend these companies for improving their keyword lists—it’s a good step forward, though not nearly enough to solve the general problem of over-flagging by the apps. In our research, LGBTQ+ resources are still commonly flagged for containing words like ‘sex,’ ‘breasts,’ or ‘
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