When the coronavirus pandemic upended traditional methods of delivering education, school districts across the country and the globe turned to online learning platforms.
It was a quick pivot. Miami-Dade County Schools, for example, switched from in-person learning to fully remote learning in a two-week time frame that overlapped with spring break, offering what many thought would be a temporary fix.
But many of the same platforms used to support teaching during what turned out to be nearly two years of at-home learning tracked students without their knowledge and shared that data with big tech companies like Facebook and Google, which could monetize the students’ information by selling ads to companies that targeted the children, according to a newly released report by the advocacy group Human Rights Watch.
