Children don’t lose their privacy — it’s taken from them before they even understand what privacy is.

      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.  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.  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.Source: Center for democracy and Technology

   One independent benchmark of K–12 apps by the nonprofit Internet Safety Labs found that 96% of school-recommended ed-tech apps share children’s personal information with third parties, often with advertisers and data-analytics firms and often without the knowledge or consent of schools or families. Their 2022 K–12 EdTech Safety Benchmark looked at apps required or recommended by 663 schools across all 50 states and the District of Columbia and concluded that the vast majority have data-sharing practices that are “not adequately safe for children.”
Source:  Internet Safety Lab  Source: Internet Safety

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

3. Ed Tech 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.  That gets recorded.  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.

     Proctorio, a popular online exam-proctoring tool, uses facial detection and gaze-tracking to flag “suspicious” behavior. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has highlighted student petitions alleging that Proctorio’s gaze tracking “discriminates against neurodivergent students” and that the software struggles to recognize students with Black or brown skin, leading to unfair flags. Independent testing reported by The Verge found that the facial detection software Proctorio relies on failed to recognize Black faces over half the time, confirming serious racial bias in how students are flagged.Source: EFF

     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.)

     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.”
Source (source: FTC Privacy Division)

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.

What does the Law Say?  Click Here for Part II