Public Schools, Private Platforms, and Your Data

Key Takeaways

• Most school platforms were designed for corporate use — not education — and bring commercial data practices into public classrooms without meaningful disclosure.
• Students can't meaningfully opt out of platform surveillance when the platform is how they access their education.
• UNESCO, UNICEF, and the ITU published a Charter for Public Digital Learning Platforms in March 2026, calling for school platforms to be publicly governed and to never share student data with third parties.
• 35 countries are already building national digital learning platforms under public authority — the alternative to corporate dependence exists and is already working.

September means new schedules, new textbooks, and new teachers. It also means logging back into the platforms that run the school day. Most students don't think much about those platforms. They probably should.

The same tools that assign homework and store grades are also recording what students click, when they log on, how long they spend on each page, and what device they used to get there. Most people never read the terms of service they clicked through to access those platforms. The platforms, meanwhile, have read them very carefully.

What the Platforms Running Your School Actually Collect

Every login is a data collection event.

A school platform records when students arrive, what they opened, which questions they skipped, how long they stayed on each section, and what they typed before they deleted it. It collects browser type, device, and in many cases location. Over a school year, that adds up to a detailed behavioral profile of every student in the system.

That data doesn't only help teachers understand how students are learning. It gets stored, analyzed, and, depending on the platform's terms of service, shared with third parties or used for purposes that have nothing to do with education. The terms that students and parents click through to access compulsory education often allow for this. Most people don't know, because most people don't read them.

There's also proctoring software — programs that watch students through their webcams during online tests, track eye movements, and flag behavior the algorithm decides looks suspicious. Many schools use these tools without explaining who reviews the recordings, how long footage is kept, or what the algorithm is actually looking for. Students are often the last to know.

Google Classroom Wasn't Built for Students

Here's the part that doesn't get said often enough: most school platforms weren't designed for schools.

Google Workspace for Education is a version of the tools businesses use. Microsoft Teams is the same. These are enterprise products adapted for classrooms, not platforms built from the ground up with learning in mind. They're free or cheap for schools because schools generate usage data and create long-term dependencies on the company's broader ecosystem.

The UNESCO-UNICEF-ITU Charter for Public Digital Learning Platforms, released in March 2026, names this problem directly. Many widely used school platforms were designed for "workplace productivity, general communication, or user engagement" — not education. When schools use them, they import a commercial relationship into a public institution. That relationship comes with trade-offs that weren't fully examined when the adoption decision was made.

The result is lock-in. A school that has spent years with its data, workflows, and institutional knowledge embedded in one vendor's system can't easily switch, even when it would prefer to. The cost of leaving is too high. That's also by design.

Public Money, Private Rules

Here's the governance problem underneath the surveillance problem.

Public schools are funded by public money. They're governed by public authorities. They're subject to democratic accountability. When something goes wrong in a public school, there are legal and political mechanisms for demanding correction.

The platforms running the digital half of those schools operate under different rules. When a company changes its terms, its pricing, or its data practices, the school is bound by the update. When student data is compromised, the company faces liability under consumer law — not under the accountability frameworks that govern public institutions. When a platform discontinues a feature teachers built their curriculum around, there is no democratic process for contesting that decision.

A physical school cannot unilaterally decide to share student records with a third party. The platform running the digital equivalent of that school can, under the terms most schools agreed to without fully reading.

And the power imbalance reaches the students too. If a student doesn't want to hand data to a streaming service, they can cancel. But if their school uses a platform to submit essays, take tests, and communicate with teachers, not using it means failing the class. That isn't consent. It's a condition attached to something they're legally required to do.

The Alternative Already Exists

I think the most important thing to know about this problem is that it isn't unsolvable.

The Gateways to Public Digital Learning initiative, run jointly by UNESCO and UNICEF since 2022, includes 35 member countries building national digital learning platforms under public authority. Egypt's Knowledge Bank, Indonesia's Merdeka Mengajar, and Uruguay's Ceibal platform are large-scale, functioning systems serving millions of students. They're publicly governed, publicly financed, and accountable to education ministries rather than to investors.

The Charter that UNESCO, UNICEF, and the ITU published in March 2026 sets out what public digital learning infrastructure should look like: governed by public authorities, built on open standards that prevent vendor lock-in, designed for learners rather than users, and committed to never sharing student data with third parties or using it for commercial purposes.

The Gateways initiative is the international structure connecting the countries building toward that standard.

The question isn't whether technology should be in schools. It should be. The question is whether the infrastructure delivering public education answers to the public or to the companies that built it. For most students in most countries right now, the answer is the second one. That's a policy choice, made mostly by default, and it's still open enough to change.