"Tech Companies Want Schools to Use COVID Relief Money on Surveillance Tools", 17 May 2021

As vaccination rates rise and schools prepare to reopen, surveillance companies have trained their sights on the billions of dollars in federal COVID-19 relief funds being provided to schools across the US, hoping to make a profit by introducing a bevy of new snooping devices.

... School administrators are used to receiving constant sales pitches from ed tech vendors. But many of the pricey products now being offered have previously been reserved for cops, or have been spun up over the last year to be marketed as solutions for reopening schools during the pandemic. Privacy experts fear that, if deployed, many of these technologies will remain in schools long after classrooms return to normal.

Motorola Solutions' suite of products in its "safe schools solutions" line includes automated license plate readers [ALPR], watch lists that send automatic alerts when people enter a building, and anonymous “tip” submission apps for students, according to a copy of the brochure shared with Motherboard. The document also advertises artificial intelligence-powered camera systems that purportedly detect “unusual motion,” track individuals using facial recognition as they move around a school, and allow staff to search through hours of video to find footage of a person simply by typing in their “physical descriptors.”

... Motorola Solutions, Verkada, and the other companies mentioned in this article, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

... What’s not clear is what happens to the ALPR data, and who else—including local police and federal agencies—may have access to it. The company and districts that use SchoolPass did not respond to requests for comment.

... As Motherboard has previously reported, ALPR data is uploaded into vast databases that are then used by cops, private investigators, and repo companies to track people across the country—in some cases, illegally.