Real-world harms caused by giving children internet-connected devices "for education."

Note from Emily: Julie is my hero. Not only is she an absolutely brilliant attorney, she is fierce, dedicated, and kind. With her husband, Andrew, she co-founded the EdTech Law Center fighting to protect students, parents, teachers, and schools from the exploitative practices of the EdTech industry. Julie was part of the group who addressed members of Parliament with me and the following is her speech from that event on Monday, November 24, 2025. Her brutally true stories about individual children harmed by EdTech products moved the audience— and panelists— to tears. (Warning: this essay references disturbing content…which our children have access to on their school-issued devices. If you find these examples concerning, join us in sounding the alarm on EdTech.)

As advocates both personally and professionally, Andy and I have worked with dozens of families whose children have been harmed by their school computers. These are just a few:

• A 6-year-old boy, who, on his school iPad, on the school network, during the school day, was served hardcore pornography for weeks before the teacher noticed, just by innocently asking Siri for pictures of pretty girls.

• Another student was able to use his school-issued Chromebook to view more than 13k YouTube videos at school in less than three months.

• A 7-year-old girl was required to use an online tutoring platform at school and was assigned an adult tutor. Her parents were never even informed that she had an online tutor. One day, the tutor was using a cartoon filter during their session. When the filter glitched, the child saw that the tutor was completely naked.

• A 10-year-old girl was victimized by a sexual predator while using her school-issued Chromebook, whose efforts to discover where she lived were thwarted only by her dad accidentally discovering the messages. One moment he was helping her with an essay, the next he was scrolling through weeks of grooming, reading hundreds of messages between his daughter and the predator. It began with the predator telling the girl that he loved her and quickly became explicit, with him telling her he wanted to use a sex toy on her and “go fast and hard” in her. He even “joked” that he was going to kidnap her. But for her father’s intervention, she could have met the same fate that thousands of children have at the hands of online predators. In fact, less than a year later, a different 10-year-old girl from the same town was kidnapped and raped by a man who had met and groomed her through the same social media platform our client had used.

• An 11-year-old, neurodivergent boy had never had internet access before receiving his school-issued Chromebook. His searches for information about Pokémon quickly and algorithmically led to anime, then pornographic anime, and ultimately to real people having real sex, which he then could view anytime he wanted at school—neither the school nor his parents could stop him. His parents weren’t there, and the school’s restrictions were inadequate. And simply not using a Chromebook was not an option, as even in-person learning is now online. The result: the boy developed a debilitating pornography addiction and compulsive sexual behaviors. In addition to watching porn, the boy would exchange naked pictures of himself with strangers and even arrange meetings with strangers for sex. His addiction has persisted through in-patient treatment and even being pulled from public school and placed in a low-tech educational environment. The boy will likely struggle with these behaviors the rest of his life.

These are just a few examples of the countless harms that students are suffering while using school-issued devices. There’s also cyberbullying, drugs, sextortion, online scams, radicalization, explicit deepfakes of peers, exploitation of students’ personal data, and the latest threat: unregulated AI chatbots, the harms of which are quickly accumulating and go far beyond cheating.

Students are persistently distracted by the allure of social media, videos, games, and now AI, all engineered to elicit compulsive use. And all just to keep kids using so that big tech can harvest more and more of their data.

Andy and I founded the EdTech Law Center to fight for these children and their families in court. In doing so, we continue a long tradition of using the justice system to protect vulnerable people from powerful, predatory actors and dangerous products, from tobacco and exploding cars, to asbestos and opioids. Today, the biggest companies in the world are selling dangerous digital products to schools for use by children as young as five. Worse, they’re marketing them as both essential and safe.

“Today, the biggest companies in the world are selling dangerous digital products to schools for use by children as young as five. Worse, they’re marketing them as both essential and safe.”

When a child gets hurt using her school computer, these companies are quick to blame everyone else—the school, the parents, even the child herself—despite that it is the companies that design, build, market, sell, operate, and ultimately profit from these products. Despite that they and they alone have the power to make them safe.

When parents speak out after their child has been harmed, or because they fear that she may be, schools variously humor them, dismiss them as Luddites, and even retaliate against them. They tar them as bad parents who have raised bad kids. Countless families have been driven out of their schools, and denied their right to a safe education.

As parents, we find ourselves asking, why is my school siding with tech companies instead of my child? While it is an understandable question, and one with many answers, it is not the most pressing one. The question we all should be asking is why are tech companies selling inherently dangerous products to schools for use by children as young as five? Shouldn’t these companies design products that come safe out of the box for students of all ages? Isn’t that what the law requires?

“The most pressing question we all should be asking is why are tech companies selling inherently dangerous products to schools for use by children as young as five? Shouldn’t these companies design products that come safe out of the box for students of all ages? Isn’t that what the law requires?”

Imagine if a textbook company delivered math books randomly crammed with games, lotto tickets, notes from other students, and pictures of naked girls. Would we really say that it’s the school’s job to inspect every book and remove this material, rather than the company’s job to make math books that are only about math?

What if a manufacturer of playground equipment delivered playscapes missing vital parts? Would we accept it if, when their swing set collapses and hurts or kills a child, they say that the harm could have been prevented if only the child had been “Playground Awesome” and fully had inspected it first? Of course not. But how is that any different from Google telling kids to avoid getting hurt online by being “Internet Awesome”?

Would it be OK for a school builder to build an elementary school composed of nothing but chemistry labs—with fire and tall stools, toxic chemicals and fragile glassware—saying that chemistry is essential and kids need to learn all they can about chemistry before they graduate, leaving schools to figure out how to make them safe? Certainly not, but how is that different from what Google demands of schools with its inherently dangerous Chromebooks?

What about EdTech’s data practices? Would we allow a massive company to assign a human observer to every student, to follow them around all day and night, at school and at home, to monitor and record their every move—their grades and class participation; but also their private conversations; their journal entries and doodles; how they write and hold their pencil; all while noting what tends to capture their attention; their strengths and weaknesses, their likes and their fears, so that the company can make predictions about their performance and behavior—all for undefined “educational purposes”? Of course not. But is it really any different when it is done invisibly through a computer, as happens on today’s EdTech platforms?

These examples are absurd, and yet they’re not. They’re simply analog approximations of the current digital reality. Schools and students are confronted with similarly absurd challenges, decisions, and dangers every day when they log onto their devices.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

It’s a choice. A choice made by big tech—not to enrich children, but to enrich themselves.

The digital environment at school can and should mirror the physical environment. In the physical school environment, the people students interact with, the products they use, and the information available to them are strictly controlled to help kids learn while keeping them safe. Trained professionals are welcome; strangers are not. Dodge balls are ok, while guns are not. Vetted curriculum and age-appropriate books are let in; pornography, ultraviolence, and other adult material are kept out.

We’re not asking for censorship; we’re asking for curation. Curation by professionals trained in healthy child development—the same as we require in the physical space.

We have to return to first principles. Schools have to stop being sites of pervasive, unaccountable, corporate surveillance that directly undermines the freedom of thought that education is designed to nurture. And they have to start prioritizing student safety and welfare over empty promises by big tech. That’s what children deserve and what the law demands.

“We have to return to first principles. Schools have to stop being sites of pervasive, unaccountable, corporate surveillance that directly undermines the freedom of thought that education is designed to nurture. And they have to start prioritizing student safety and welfare over empty promises by Big Tech. That’s what children deserve and what the law demands.”

Returning to first principles does not mean turning back the clock or starting from scratch. There are many brilliant scholars who have spent their careers examining EdTech closely and objectively, some of whom live right here in the UK.

To name just a few, there’s Dr. Valerie Handunge, who examines EdTech’s capture of education, Dr. Velislava Hillman, who specializes in the datafication of learning, and who you will hear from next, as well as Dr. John Potter and Dr. Ben Williamson, the editors of Learning, Media and Technology, the leading journal for critical EdTech studies. We must banish the big tech salesmen who view education as just another market to capture, and listen to those devoted to preserving education as a space to cultivate human potential, nourish democratic values, and provide for the common good.

Excerpt of Julie delivering her speech to Parliament, Nov. 24, 2025.

Julie Liddell, Lego women’s suffragette, and me (Emily Cherkin)

If you have a concern related to your child’s use of EdTech products in school, please contact Andy and Julie at EdTech Law Center.

To view my speech to Parliament, visit this link. To view Andy’s speech, visit this link.