There are millions of workers, and most importantly, students, who spend vast amounts of their waking lives on managed devices, in environments with unnecessarily restrictive policies.

They are, by virtue of their place of work or study, unable to take advantage of utilities that are vital to digital privacy, such as ad-blockers and other content-filtering solutions.

While this may sound like a trifling concern to some, as an individual who has worked as a system administrator, as a teacher, and as an entry-level support technician — who has been on both sides of the table, so to speak — I believe it is of great import.

In schools around the world, especially in North America, Chromebooks and Android tablets have become an all-too-common sight. Not only are students forced to use these devices in many classrooms, but they are often provisioned with web-filtering applications that are remotely administered, and — rather than protect them from ads & tracking — double as surveillance tools.

These machines are outfitted with software like GoGuardian, Bark, and Gaggle, that do a whole lot more than block inappropriate content. They are then expected to perform tasks and complete assignments using Google Apps For Education, or the Microsoft 365 Education suite.

The result is that all student activity on — and in some cases, in-front of — these devices, can be remotely observed, monitored, and scanned, in real time. Additionally, their activity, and any content they produce, is subject to automated analysis, which builds profiles of students, along with flagging “suspicious” behavior, and reporting it to teachers, administrators, and even law enforcement.

All the while, they are data-mined by the likes of Google and Microsoft as they do their classwork. This is a disheartening situation that replicates the very worst ethical and social problems of advertising and tracking, right in the classroom. I have been required to administer such software in the past, so can tell you first hand that it is cause for great concern.

A little more than ten years ago, before I made the curious decision to enter a graduate program full time, I was hired by an alternative school in an essentially dual capacity, taking on the roles of both computer teacher, and system administrator. Due to a push from some members of the community, this school had, after years of eschewing computers for students, instituted a computer class for the third grade and up.

While the school had to honor agreements to use Windows on the student PCs, and some specific educational titles, as their first computer teacher — and only line of on-site support — I was free to implement a whole lot from the ground up. Though my resources were somewhat limited, rather than have the students surveilled, I took a three-pronged approach to inappropriate content.

I configured the router for the classroom to use OpenDNS Family Shield, and with the help of some third-party software, I ensured that the base Windows image which I deployed to student computers, had a hosts file in place that was updated every three days.

It pulled in entries from a variety of sources — including a personally curated list on a networked drive — to block additional inappropriate content, social media, and common ad & tracking servers.

Finally, the student PCs all had Firefox set as the default browser, complete with Adblock Plus, along with the EasyList and EasyPrivacy subscriptions enabled. When I would catch wind of undoubtedly inappropriate websites being discussed by students, I would take note of them, and ensure that the domains were blocked through hosts before the day was over.

This, and a little attention, is all it took. Children were not able to access inappropriate content in my classroom, and there was never a need for convoluted monitoring software. I could simply focus on lesson plans and teaching my students. In that same classroom, one of the many units I did for higher grade levels was on internet safety and privacy.

Through the use of Mozilla’s Lightbeam extension — and temporarily disabling most content-filtering on one PC — I showed students a live visualization of how much they were being tracked as they browsed popular websites.

While some were quite bored with this exercise, other students took great interest in the topic, asking me to show them more about my computing preferences, what ad-blocking measures I used on my own devices, and an assortment of related topics.

I was able to parlay increased interest from students like this into an after-school computer club, where we worked together on Raspberry Pi kits, and a variety of projects under Linux.

I share this anecdote, because like so many things, our relationship with technology starts at a very young age. While we must guard children from inappropriate and harmful content, to instill in them an association of computing with draconian surveillance measures and a feeling of always being watched, is inappropriate and harmful in its own right.

It is richly ironic that what passes for content-filtering and security software in so many schools and homes, would be considered malware and spyware were it to be found on any of our personal devices.

Whether it is tracking and profiling for increased revenue, or tracking and profiling for a false sense of security, it is surveillance — in fact, mass surveillance — all the same, and the outcome is always a loss of agency. In the case of learning institutions, lost opportunity as well.

In 1996, the same year my father gave me my first computer, the late John Perry Barlow penned a manifesto of sorts, A Declaration of Independence for Cyberspace. In it, he wrote as follows:

We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity. Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here… We will create a civilization of the mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.

While things obviously did not pan out the way that Barlow envisioned, I believe that there is still a chance to turn the tide, if we are just a bit more mindful of how we use technology, and remember that our devices were meant to serve us, not define the contours of our lives.