FERPA & AI: How EdTech Is Surveilling Students (And Why the Law Lets Them)

Your child's school knows more about them than you do. Not their grades — you know those. The school knows which YouTube videos they watch during study hall, how long they spend on each paragraph of their assigned reading, whether their mouse movements indicate distraction, what their facial expressions looked like during last Tuesday's quiz, and whether the biosignals from their Chromebook camera suggest they're about to cheat. This data is legal to collect. The law that was supposed to prevent it has a loophole you could drive a data center through. And AI is making the surveillance dramatically more sophisticated. FERPA: The 52-Year-Old Law That Wasn't Built for AI The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) was passed in 1974 — the year after the first commercial handheld calculator. It was designed to protect paper records: grades, disciplinary files, test scores. The law gives parents (and students over 18) the right to inspect and correct those records. FERPA was not d