Key Takeaways
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Student safety and student privacy are not opposing goals, but monitoring must be clearly limited to defined safety purposes to avoid becoming surveillance.
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Collecting more data does not automatically make students safer and often increases privacy, security, and equity risks without improving outcomes.
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The most sustainable path forward is a collaborative, guardrail-based approach that balances safety needs with transparency, data minimization, and respect for student trust.
Few issues in edtech carry higher stakes than security and privacy.
Schools are under mounting pressure to safeguard students’ physical, digital, and emotional well-being; a challenge made increasingly visible as concerns about screen time and online safety move beyond social media and into everyday classroom technologies. At the same time, schools are entrusted with the protection of unprecedented amounts of sensitive student data. Meeting these dual responsibilities is not optional, and getting it wrong carries real consequences.
Educators, edtech providers, and policymakers must walk a very fine line as they work to shape edtech practices that protect students without sacrificing their privacy or trust.
Why Monitoring Exists in the First Place
In K–12 environments, device monitoring is often driven by legitimate safety concerns. Schools are expected to prevent serious harm, including self-harm, violence, bullying, and exploitation. Monitoring tools can help surface warning signs early, enabling timely intervention and helping schools meet their duty-of-care obligations. Used appropriately, these tools can play a critical role in protecting students.
When Safety Becomes Surveillance
The privacy challenge emerges when monitoring shifts from targeted safety use cases to broad, “always-on” surveillance. Some tools collect far more data than necessary, full browsing histories, private messages, screenshots, and continuous activity logs, rather than focusing narrowly on specific safety risks.
From a privacy standpoint, excessive data collection is risky. The more data gathered, the greater the exposure to misuse, breaches, and unintended consequences. Collecting everything “just in case” can undermine both a students’ privacy and cybersecurity without meaningfully improving student safety.
Privacy Doesn’t Stop at the School Gate
Students’ privacy expectations do not disappear simply because a device is school-issued or an app is school-approved. This becomes especially sensitive when monitoring extends beyond campus or outside school hours. Students may be researching personal health topics, communicating with trusted adults, or exploring ideas that are entirely unrelated to school.
Scope and timing matter. Monitoring that ignores context risks crossing from protection into intrusion.
When Safety Tools Meet Privacy-First Platforms
The balancing act becomes even more complicated when edtech companies building safety-monitoring tools need to operate alongside, or within, products designed with data minimization and privacy-by-design as core principles. Integrations between monitoring systems, learning platforms, and device ecosystems can surface real tensions between safety objectives and privacy commitments.
These conflicts are not theoretical. They reflect fundamental questions about how much data is necessary, who should have access to it, and how long it should exist at all.
A Collaborative Path Forward
The choice is not between total surveillance and doing nothing. A workable middle ground exists, grounded in proportionality and strong guardrails: clear purpose limits, transparency for students and families, minimum data collection, short retention periods, strict access controls, and firm boundaries to prevent “mission creep” into general discipline or profiling.
Recognizing the complexity of these issues, 1EdTech members including, Departments of Education and Public Instruction from Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina; Google; Microsoft; Linewize; Lightspeed Systems; Securly; Gaggle; Jamf Software; Gwinnett County Public Schools and Volusia County Schools and others, are taking on this challenge through a new Student Security Task Force. Bringing together edtech providers, educational leaders and policymakers, the task force is designed to openly debate these tensions and work toward shared approaches that protect student data while still enabling schools to meet their safety responsibilities.
Members interested in participating should fill out this interest form.
Security That Respects Students
The hardest problems in edtech security aren’t solved by collecting more data or deploying more powerful monitoring tools. They’re solved through collaboration, restraint, and clarity of purpose. Protecting students means keeping them safe and respecting their privacy, dignity, and trust. Getting that balance right is one of the most important tasks facing the edtech community today.
About the Authors
Kevin Lewis is the Data Privacy Officer for 1EdTech. Before joining 1EdTech, Kevin then moved on to work as an Education Technology Specialist and headed the district’s student data privacy, Internet safety and security initiative. In the two years of heading this initiative, Kevin was able to raise awareness about student data privacy and influence education technology products to improve upon their privacy practices.
As Senior Director at 1EdTech, Monica Watts champions digital equity and interoperability by uniting K-12 institutions and edtech providers to create seamless, scalable technology solutions. With a deep passion for education and innovation, she strives to ensure schools can integrate technology effectively to enhance learning outcomes.
