Student Monitoring Tools Should Not Flag LGBTQ+ Keywords

One of the more dangerous features of student monitoring tools like GoGuardian, Gaggle, and Bark is their “flagging” functionality. The tools can scan web pages, documents in students’ cloud drives, emails, video content, and more for keywords about topics like sex, drugs, and violence. They then either block or flag this content for review by school administrators. 

But in practice, these flags don’t work very well—many of the terms flagged by these student monitoring applications are often ambiguous, implicating whole …