Kids in America have fewer digital rights than any adult in this country — including the ones who exploit them. That’s the paradox.  We built a surveillance economy so addicted to behavioral data that it treats children not as minors but as pre-adults in training, early investments in future ad revenue.

No one voted for this.
No one debated it.
It just… happened.

Because the people designing the system realized the truth:  If you grab a kid’s data early, you own the adult they grow into.  That’s the whole business model disguised as “education technology,” “family safety,” and “learning analytics.”

Let’s get into it.

1. We Start Tracking Kids Before They Can Walk
Hospitals, insurers, and baby-product manufacturers openly trade infant data.
Yes — babies. Literal babies.
Receipt:
     The Federal Trade Commission fined WW International (formerly Weight Watchers) for illegally collecting data from children as young as eight and profiling them for long-term “weight habit” modeling.
Source: FTC case file, 2022.

     If you think eight is young, remember: hospital newborn screenings feed data into state-managed systems that aren’t governed by CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act) or GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation). Parents can’t opt out.
And that’s where the pipelines start.
👉  State databases

👉  Medical billing systems
👉  Insurance risk scoring
👉  Retail baby-club programs (they KNOW when you’re pregnant)
👉  Hospital IT vendors
👉Ad-tech identifiers tied to baby registries

A kid’s “life file” begins before they can form a memory
— and it’s already leaking.

2. Schools Are the New Surveillance Labs
Walk into any U.S. school district today and you’ll find a Frankenstein stack of:
👉  Classroom cameras

👉  AI behavior analytics
👉  Proctoring software
👉  Laptop and tablet monitoring
👉  Keylogging
👉  Search scanning
👉  Email scraping
👉  Geo-fencing

👉  Anonymous threat detection systems

     All justified with the same magic phrase: “safety.”  But when you run it through a systems lens, that’s not what’s happening.  What’s happening is:  Kids are being trained to accept surveillance as normal.
Receipts:
    A 2023 Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) study found 89% of school surveillance tools routinely scanned student messages unrelated to safety, flagging LGBTQ+ conversations, mental-health questions, and ordinary teenage curiosity.

    Another CDT report showed 71% of schools pass student data to third-party vendors without transparent contracts or parent notice.
Bark, GoGuardian, Gaggle, Securly — the big four — all sell data “insights” back to districts and partners.

In other words, school is not just school anymore.  School is a data mine.

3. EdTech Isn’t About Education — It’s About Behavioral Futures.  The boom in “learning analytics” looks like innovation until you peel back the layer.  Every tap, pause, hesitation, wrong answer, and keystroke becomes a behavioral data point.  Those points are fed into predictive models that companies call:

“Engagement insights”
“Performance risk scores”
“Attention heatmaps”
“Behavioral flags”
These are not neutral metrics.  These are micro-profiles.

Receipt:
Proctorio, an online exam-proctoring company, was caught using facial detection, gaze monitoring, and behavior scoring that disproportionately flagged Black students, disabled students, and neurodivergent students.
Source: EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation), 2021–2023.

This isn’t education; it’s predictive policing for homework.  And because kids don’t have bargaining power, everything is “consent by attendance.”  Show up to school → You get scanned.

4. Children Have Fewer Privacy Rights Than Criminals
Let me say this plainly because nobody wants to hear it:

A child in an American school has fewer digital privacy rights than a convicted adult in probation programs.

Probationers at least get:
Notice
Options
Lawyers
Standards

Children get:
“Click accept or your kid can’t attend class.”
“We own your kid’s data because you opened this Chromebook.”
“We share metrics with vendors but it’s anonymized.” (Spoiler: It’s not.)

Receipt:
In 2022, the FTC warned that “de-identified” children’s data can be re-identified with over 85% accuracy using modern analytics.
Source: FTC Privacy Division technical report.  So when school districts say “we anonymize everything,” what they really mean is:  “We’re hoping nobody checks.”

5. Parents Think They’re Protecting Their Kids — But They’re Feeding the Machine
    This is the part that makes people uncomfortable, but we have to say it:  Parents are unintentionally some of the biggest contributors to children’s digital exposure.

They:
Post photos
Tag schools
Share birthdays
Use baby trackers
Install family-monitoring spyware
Put Alexa in bedrooms
Hand kids tablets with 40 apps installed.  This is not about shaming.  This is about systems.  Parents are told they must monitor, because “bad things happen if you don’t.”

But take a guess:  Who created the panic?  Who funded the studies?  Who shaped the media narrative that kids are always in danger?  The same companies selling surveillance tools to families.

6. The Real Reason Kids Have No Privacy Protections

Kids don’t vote.
Kids can’t sue.
Kids can’t lobby Congress.
Kids don’t buy products — their parents do.

So every incentive points the same direction:  Exploit the data.  Delay the laws.
Wait until the child becomes an adult with a fully built behavioral profile.  It’s not a conspiracy.  It’s capitalism optimized. And the outcome is predictable:
By 18, the average American child is already:

Facial-recognition indexed
Biometric-patterned
Location-behavior modeled
Advertising-profiled
Academic-scored
Risk-rated
Algorithmically categorized

Before their first job, their first vote, their first mistake — the system already decided who they are.

OK Khattab,  So What’s the Solution?
       Fair question. We’re not going to regulate our way out of this and we’re definitely not going to “strong password” our way out of a multi-billion-dollar surveillance machine. The way out starts where the data is born: homes, schools, neighborhoods, and the gear sitting on our own shelves. Instead of waiting for a heroic app or some bullshit federal task force, we rebuild the basics of everyday tech so they serve us first and everyone else second.
It’s Not “More Laws.” It’s Local Power.

The solutions start local:
1. Local-first school tech (district-level privacy demands)
    Instead of handing student data to remote platforms by default, districts can demand tools that work offline and sync only what’s truly necessary. That means servers in the district, not across the country, so parents and school boards actually have leverage over how data is stored and used. Local-first tech also makes it easier to audit what’s happening with kids’ information, rather than trusting a vendor’s opaque dashboard and marketing claims.

2. Parental firewalls — not parental spyware
    Kids deserve boundaries, not a surveillance state at home. A good parental firewall blocks obviously dangerous content and high-risk sites at the network level, but doesn’t log every message, track every tap, or secretly read their chats. It’s about setting house rules and protecting mental health, while still giving kids room to grow, make mistakes, and learn to self-regulate instead of being constantly watched.

3. Community tech cooperatives
    Imagine a neighborhood or school district owning its own small server cluster the same way it might own a community center or library. Members chip in a small monthly amount and, in return, get shared tools like email, file storage, chat, and homework portals that they control. Decisions about data retention, filtering, and access are made by local families and educators—not by distant boards chasing ad revenue or growth targets.

4. Privacy-first routers and Iot
Move scanning and filtering back home instead of upstream with ISPs.Most “smart” homes quietly push data out to cloud services where it can be mined, profiled, and sold. A privacy-first setup pulls that intelligence back inside the home: the router does the traffic inspection, the home hub runs the automations, and devices talk locally whenever possible. Scanning and filtering happens on your hardware, under your roof, so your household’s habits don’t become another row in a marketing database or AI training set.

5. Teach kids digital sovereignty

Not fear.
Not panic.
Not “stranger danger.”
Teach them:

What data is

How platforms manipulate

How to minimize exposure

8. The Big Picture: The System Is Raising Kids to Be Good Data Subjects

This is the part no one wants to say out loud:  The modern American child is being trained to see surveillance as normal, harmless, and inevitable.  By the time they become adults, compliance is muscle memory.  And that’s the point.  Because a society that never remembers privacy never fights for it.