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.īut 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. 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.
Photograph: (Photo courtesy Teeth Logsdon-Wallace) The assignment was flagged by the student surveillance company Gaggle. In a classroom assignment, Teeth Logsdon-Wallace explained how a Ramshackle Glory song helped him cope after he tried to kill himself. 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. 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. 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”. His billowing depression landed him in the hospital after he tried to kill himself. 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.įor 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.