Technologies endorsed by the government and used in classrooms all over Australia may be surveilling and harvesting children's data, in most cases secretly and without consent, a Human Rights Watch report has revealed.

Data on who students are, where they are, what they do in the classroom, and who their family and friends are is being collected and shared, the report said.

And while lockdowns may have ended, these technologies like Zoom, Microsoft Teams and other tools used in the classroom are here to stay.

This data harvesting is putting the digital rights of children at risk, say experts at the University of Wollongong.

UOW Lecturers Dr Tiffani Apps and Dr Karley Beckman research digital learning technologies, and they say digital and data regulation online is currently akin to "the wild west".

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One of the main issues, Dr Apps said, is that children and parents are not aware of what data is being collected and where it's going, and the choice is out of their hands.

Dr Apps and Dr Beckman said some of the data is likely being used to create a "profile" of students for the purposes of targeted advertising.

While a spokesperson from the Department of Education said no student data from NSW had been compromised, the researchers said governments and schools both have a responsibility to do more to protect children's data.

"The most important step is regulation," Dr Beckman said.

Amending our Data Privacy Act and adding enforceable regulations to protect children's data privacy is a must, she said.

The current Data Privacy Act pre-dates the existence of the World Wide Web, she said, so it is insufficient in protecting people in a modern context.

"We all have digital rights that are being compromised, but children deserve some special protections."

For many children, their entire existence has been "datafied", Dr Apps said, and we still don't know the repercussions of this.

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"They've been captured from pre-conception if you think about apps that look at birth," she said.

"What that means for them in the future is unknown and a little bit scary, because there are lots of inequities around the way that data is sold, collated and used."

We see data being used to make decisions in terms of job applications and finances, she said, and unfortunately the most vulnerable in our society are disadvantaged by that.

Schools and education departments should also think critically about which apps they're bringing into the classroom, and what it means for student data, she said.

A spokesperson from the Department of Education said they have a strong focus on maintaining the privacy and protection of student data.

"The Department is continuing to liaise directly with the platform providers to ensure that student data is protected as agreed," they said.

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