A boy wrote about his suicide attempt. He didn't realize his school's Gaggle software was watching
In the midst of a pandemic and a national uprising, Teeth Logsdon-Wallace was kept awake at night last summer by the constant sounds of helicopters and sirens.
For the 13-year-old from Minneapolis, who lives close to where George Floyd was murdered in May 2020, the pandemic-induced isolation and social unrest amplified the emotional distress he was experiencing as a result of gender dysphoria. His billowing depression landed him in the hospital after he tried to kill himself. During that dark stretch, he spent his days in an outpatient psychiatric facility, where he listened to a punk song on loop that promised things would soon “get better”. Eventually they did.
Logsdon-Wallace, a transgender eighth-grader, has since “graduated” from weekly therapy sessions and is doing better, but that didn’t stop school officials from springing into action after he wrote about his mental health. In a school assignment last month, he reflected on his suicide attempt and how the anthem by the band Ramshackle Glory helped him cope – intimate details that wound up in the hands of district security.
The classroom assignment was one of thousands of Minneapolis student communications that got flagged by Gaggle, a digital surveillance company that saw rapid growth after the pandemic forced schools into remote learning. In an earlier investigation, the non-profit website The 74 analyzed nearly 1,300 public records from Minneapolis Public Schools to expose how Gaggle subjects students to relentless, round-the-clock digital surveillance, raising significant privacy concerns for more than 5 million young people across the country who are monitored by the company’s algorithm and human content moderators.
But technology experts and families with first-hand experience with Gaggle’s surveillance dragnet have raised another issue: the service is not only invasive; it may also be ineffective.
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2021/oct/12/school-surveillance-dragnet-suicide-attempt-healing
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This is just WRONG! Also, "Teeth"? 
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