March 31st, 2001
Schools Aren't Market Research Factories
By Gary Ruskin
Commercial Alert
Last September, Web-filter company N2H2 Inc. and the Roper Starch Worldwide marketing firm came up with a clever scheme. They would plant a market research tool in school classrooms where children, by law, must spend their days. The new service would, in the company’s words, help corporate advertisers “measure and analyze how U.S. kids K-12 use the Internet” and “guide their advertising and brand development strategies.”
In other words, they would begin to convert the schools from learning centers to selling centers—extensions of the shopping malls. The company proudly tells of “currently tracking almost a billion in-school pageviews per month, offering an unprecedented in-depth analysis of ‘teens and tweens’ Web habits.”
Here’s how N2H2 does its schoolroom snooping. According to the Wall Street Journal, its Bess filtering system “knows where the students go on the Web and how long they spend there.”
The child-tracking data, called Class Clicks, is aggregated, which means the Web-surfing of individual students cannot be identified. But for $15,000 a year, advertisers get monthly reports on where schoolchildren are going on the Internet, with Roper Starch’s estimates of the races and ages of the students.
N2H2’s sophisticated in-school spying and data-collection scheme helps marketers worm their way into kids’ heads. N2H2 tells marketers that it “offers much greater drill-down capability” into the Web-browsing habits of children, who are an increasingly lucrative target for marketers.
N2H2 has sold its child-surveillance data to corporate marketers, such as BigChalk Inc., and the U.S. Department of Defense, which wants to improve its recruitment marketing.
Is this what the public schools and the compulsory schooling laws are for? Is this something that teachers feel proud of—to preside over a corporate market research factory that touts its “drill-down capability” into the psyches of the children entrusted to them?
When they send their children to school, parents trust that they will be safe from the creepy prying of self-interested adults. Allowing N2H2 software into the schools is a violation of that trust. This is especially true given that N2H2 boasts to marketers that its “data-collection mechanism is totally unobtrusive.”
N2H2 is not the kind of corporation to invite into a school. To protect children from classroom snoops, it’s best to remove N2H2’s Web-filtering software from school computers. Or, at the very least, there ought to be full disclosure to parents of any and all uses of data gathered by the firm.
Gary Ruskin is director of Commercial Alert, http://www.commercialalert.org, a network dedicated to protecting children and communities from commercialism, advertising and marketing