What happens after a monitoring alert gets generated about your child? There are at least three separate files, three sets of rules, and one of them lives in a company's database rather than your school. FERPA gives you the right to look at the record and argue with it, not to delete it.
Decoding the Digital World Your Kids Are Growing Into
Insights from an Ethical Technologist to help parents raise digitally sovereign kids.
Featured
Amazon owns primary care, a pharmacy, and an AI health assistant — all folded into Prime, all one login. HIPAA is the firewall they promise will hold. Here's why the walls are thinner than the warranty suggests, and what parents should weigh.
Snapstreaks, Snap Scores, and a map showing who's hanging out where. Internal court documents show Snap knew exactly what its design does to teen mental health. Here's the machinery, and what parents can do.
Latest
Being Autistic means one thing to the DSM, another to the doctor, another to the school, and several things to the government. Every definition is written into your child's record. The one written by the Autistic person never is.
Roblox averaged 127 million daily users in 2025, and nearly three quarters of the verified ones are minors. It reads every chat, records voice, and now scans faces to unlock chat. Court settlements required it to collect even more. The safety system and the surveillance are the same machine.
What happens after a monitoring alert gets generated about your child? There are at least three separate files, three sets of rules, and one of them lives in a company's database rather than your school. FERPA gives you the right to look at the record and argue with it, not to delete it.
You can change your child's password, school, and email address. You can't change their genome. Between the newborn heel prick, prenatal screening, and the gifted ancestry kit, most of it gets collected before they can speak, and the law leaves a gap that lasts decades.
The MarkUp has reported Doctoralia — one brand of a booking company operating across thirteen countries under thirteen privacy laws — sent information about their medical appointments, including the specialties and names of doctors, to social media companies including TikTok, Google, and LinkedIn.
School monitoring software is tuned to a neurotypical baseline. For neurodivergent kids, normal existence generates alerts: literal searches, task-switching, repeated questions. The flags aren't accidents — they're the system working as designed.
Sign Up for Smoke Signals
A bi-weekly digest of critical insights on privacy, security, and raising digitally sovereign kids.