GoGuardian
As the world becomes more and more digitized, the education sector is struggling to keep up. As it becomes increasingly difficult to focus online, schools have increasingly turned to a one-size-fits-all solution—child spyware. Securly, Gaggle, Lightspeed, and most importantly, GoGuardian, all market themselves as easy fixes to problems like explicit content, games, and social media addiction. Most importantly, GoGuardian monitors well over 20 million students in the U.S; a number like this represents half of the total student population up until college.
GoGuardian is, in essence, the soft-core family-friendly version of spyware that practically markets itself as surveillance for the age range of 8-13. 81% of schools use digital monitoring solutions to keep tabs on students, and GoGuardian is the leading company in this range of ‘solutions’. As of August 5, 2021, GoGuardian is valued at over $1 billion. It’s known almost universally across American schools that practically every student, from the time they start using their school-issued electronics, will be in classrooms that use GoGuardian. GoGuardian is a name that is almost synonymous with ‘streamlining learning’, marketing itself as the gold standard in digital surveillance and educational engagement. According to their marketing department, “GoGuardian empowers K-12 leaders with effective tools to create safe and engaging learning for every student. Equip administrators, mental health officers, counselors, and educators with the necessary tools to focus digital exploration on learning, shield students from harmful content, and identify the signs of student harm.”
Their track record when it comes to delivering those outcomes is mixed, but GoGuardian has a history of lying about statistics for the sake of building a brand, peddling ‘solutions’ that equate to mass surveillance and are proven to not actually increase productivity or address mental health issues, and taking advantage of the education sector’s need to fulfill digital quotas set by policymakers as a way to coerce the system into ‘protecting students online’. GoGuardian has no real positive impact on student mental health or productivity; its success as a tech conglomerate hinges on the fact that students aren’t the ones giving real feedback, and parents aren’t going to care much about what tools teachers use to keep their kids learning. Unfortunately, it’s still dominating the educational tech market, but what exactly does GoGuardian do, and why are districts so dependent on child spyware?
Digital surveillance, for kids.
Spyware obviously isn’t the best solution to remedy a lack of learning, but does the company make a good product? The short answer is no. But they’ve done a great job in fooling educators into thinking otherwise.
According to their executives, GoGuardian is ‘safe learning, simplified’. GoGuardian grants you ‘actionable insights at your fingertips’, ‘the most comprehensive solution’. Their laundry list of practical and actionable insights includes real-time GPS locations of students, passwords, search history, IP addresses, usage times, exact keystroke patterns, and screenshots of students’ screens. GoGuardian is an absolute gold mine of personal data; it knows all the intricacies of your online life. For the vast majority of kids, this single app knows more about their physical life than most of their teachers. The company basically locks down the internet with mass filtering by keywords, flagged content, and snippets of code that might contain content that’s considered ‘taboo’. It’s insane to think how software like this is the best way to keep kids engaged, to foster an actual willingness to learn, and to increase a student’s productivity and results. It’s also not much of a surprise that GoGuardian Beacon, the ‘prevention’ suite that the company offers, seems to be relatively ineffective in actually rectifying damage caused by real-world self-harm attempts and mental health issues. Its blocking algorithm works exactly the same as a watered-down Chrome web store site blocker, redirecting a student accessing blocked sites to a ‘blocked.goguardian.com’.
The spyware functionality just comes in the form of a Chrome Web Store extension, basically requiring administrator permissions on Chromebooks once you download the GoGuardian extension. There’s an admin/teacher portal that has different sessions for different classes, as well as all the student screens. Perhaps unfortunately, GoGuardian is terrible at doing its job. The app’s built-in mass censorship features can’t even block most games. Any tech-illiterate student with minimal amounts of dedication can bypass it and play games; what’s even worse is that teachers then don’t expect to have to monitor the class or engage all the students, since they expect GoGuardian to do the heavy lifting for them, which GoGuardian advertises itself aggressively as being able to do so for every single class. This means teachers become less willing to keep their classes actually engaged.
The largest and most popular online gaming sites that distract students in class are obviously blocked by the censorship algorithm, but an entire ecosystem of online gaming sites has taken their place, using Google Ads and bored students, who still display the same addictive gaming behaviors before GoGuardian was turned on, to make cash. Lots of online games have easy-to-embed code snippets that work differently from iframes (which only link to a specific site) that can be pasted with ease. There are libraries of these identical games across hundreds of sites that offer the same exact game—a cheap strategy, but one that offers an extremely consistent experience. Part of the reason why some teachers really do think that GoGuardian keeps their kids on task is that they’re largely tech illiterate—they don’t know that students can just switch off the wifi or land on an about: blank page and freely game the whole class with GoGuardian not being able to do anything about it. The students who might actually be off-task are doing so under the radar, making it look as if all the students are on task when they boot up GoGuardian to monitor them.
GoGuardian is a cheap tool, masquerading behind the facade of ‘keeping kids engaged’ while doing the bare minimum and turning a blind eye to actually helping kids learn. The truth is that they don’t monitor kids properly; they’re just here to monetize. They might as well be spending more on advertising a shiny brand image than developing an effective education tool that really helps students learn. If you actually wanted to help kids stay engaged and increase their productivity, that requires a ton of effort, it necessitates a shift in responses and behavior as well as a change in how kids interact with technology. Even if they tried, brute forcing kids into a learning environment doesn’t work—the company makes it seem like that’s not the case, but their public image says otherwise. There are literally 25,000 signatures from disgruntled students, thinking they can force officials to ‘ban GoGuardian’, on a Change.org petition asking to ban GoGuardian. On every single public tech reviewing site, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of 12-year-olds writing in all caps, saying slurs, and spamming how much they HATE GoGuardian. You’d be hard-pressed to find a single student who approves of their teacher’s use of the tool; doing so is the equivalent of winning the lottery. But of course, it can all be played down as just a bunch of immature and underdeveloped students who took it upon themselves to learn how swear words work and cope with not being able to play games during class. That surface criticism makes it easy for actual criticisms of the company to fall on tone-deaf ears, even parents just expect a decent education where their kid is supposed to be learning something, so signing forms that allow their kid to be monitored at any time by digital spyware doesn’t seem very relevant anymore. In an ideal world, a kid would be wholeheartedly focused and locked in on schoolwork, not having to worry about games or YouTube being blocked.
This is how scummy educational companies like Collegeboard and GoGuardian operate—they operate off of ignorance, a willingness from parents and adults to tell you to ‘just do your work’, that sometimes you have to swallow a pill, to take the only route forward in education. If you were truly a good student, you would have no qualms about being watched. A wise person (by the name of Edward Snowden) once said, “Arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.” But it seems like nobody has anything to say.
Lying about statistics.
If all of this wasn’t enough, GoGuardian’s marketing department has straightened out some serious eye candy on their website. They’ve forged some ludicrous claims in the name of turning out profits, the first of which is the first thing they hit you with when you land on their official website. (goguardian.com) Much of these statistics are there to convince you that they offer solutions that work for kids, that they provide a catch-all solution against harmful activity on the web. They have footnotes for each of their ‘statistics’ that give you the methodology for each value and usually say things that are a little different from the conclusions the company draws from them.
Educators rank GoGuardian #1 for student outcomes in safety & productivity- At the top of their website, it says this. When you try to fact-check this claim, it simply says it’s from an October 2024 Hanover survey of K-12 IT Professionals—not a country, not a state, a single town called Hanover. It doesn’t even say ‘teachers’, or ‘educational professionals’; it only references K-12 IT professionals, a job that obviously isn’t representative of ‘educator opinion’. The number of IT professionals varies wildly from district to district, but the largest schools usually only have around 10-15 IT professionals. In a single city or town, even a liberal rough estimate would fall short of even 100 total K-12 IT professionals—this data means nothing and is the equivalent of GoGuardian pulling statistics out of its ass. The location stated only leaves us with more questions than answers. Which Hanover? There are 11 towns in the U.S. named Hanover. Furthermore, GoGuardian does offer its products to foreign markets, so could it be Hanover, Germany? Either way, taking data from an analysis of a single town or city is vague and obviously not fit to extrapolate results from. They also use this study to tell you that they’re the #1 choice for K-12 web filtering.
The most loved classroom management tool used by 1.9M teachers- The ‘most loved’ part comes from a national survey that sampled a group of K-12 teachers and asked them about their ‘preferences’ on digital monitoring tools. When corporate marketing says something like that about their methodology, it’s rational to assume that they’re yet again stretching the scope of whatever jargon they choose to misrepresent a statistic. If I asked 1,000 dentists across the country about their ‘preferences’ for toothpaste, it would allow them to put multiple leading brands in a single response—take Colgate, for example. Since Colgate is the largest toothpaste brand in America, dentists are bound to put it as one of the notable brands in their ‘preferences’. Then, if 8 dentists simply write down Colgate as one company they prefer, their marketing executives can turn that data into the statement, ‘Colgate is the [most loved]/[recommended]/[preferred] toothpaste brand by 8 out of 10 dentists’. This is likely the case here—it’s kept as vague as possible, with just enough room for a claim like this to be considered somewhat ‘valid’ by GoGuardian’s marketing team. Based on the intent of the survey they rely on, it’s apparent that GoGuardian is misrepresenting the data to make it look like 1.9 million teachers ‘love’ their product the ‘most’.
An estimated 18,623 students protected from physical harm- This one provokes me the most since it’s GoGuardian making it look like they’re the ones saving students from REAL WORLD HARM. It makes it look like they just nobly saved 18 thousand children when the real number is nearly impossible to determine; they’re trying to wash their brand image clean with this one. The fabrication and misrepresentation of statistics is EVEN WORSE in this one. The actual 18,623 number comes from GoGuardian Beacon sending that number of reports to school districts from 2020-2024. A single alert in this case would count as ‘a child protected’ from physical harm. All GoGuardian has to do in this situation is to have its algorithm flag content and send out an alert—no contacting the student, working to resolve the cause of that potential harm, and getting the student help in the future—that’s all left to the district administration to do, the ones who are quite possible falsely advertised by statistics like these into buying a GoGuardian subscription. The amount of total alerts is even massively inflated, exacerbated by the fact that GoGuardian is a company notorious for sending out fake red flags and churning out false positives. Students can literally search up queries like ‘how to build a bomb’ as a complete joke, and Beacon would send out an alert, thereby ‘protecting’ the student from nonexistent real-world harm. The company doesn’t do ANYTHING to go through an effective prevention protocol with the student; they’re just the ones raising the red flags (and false positives), collecting their cash, and then claiming credit for what the school faculty does to resolve the issue.
There’s even more statistics on their website, again using the 2024 Hanover research to make the claim that 91% of ‘educators’ ‘favor’ GoGuardian for keeping their students and ‘community’ ‘safe’. All the quoted words are quoted as a result of them being extraordinarily vague, likely using the Hanover research to cherry-pick factoids and then misrepresent them with a single statistic aimed at making GoGuardian’s brand image look great. Another statistic says that 84% of respondents agreed that their school effectively implemented online content filters that restricted students’ access to harmful content, as well as the SIXTH misleading statistic saying that 9 of 10 respondents agreed that their school could better monitor content, policies, and communications with students using school-issued devices. Giving credit where credit is due, those two statistics are actually from surveys talking about GoGuardian specifically, so all responses are solely about GoGuardian—though of course, this still isn’t a ‘clean’ representation of the actual data. (What did you expect?) For both of these surveys, a response of ‘somewhat agreed’ and ‘somewhat satisfied’ counts as ‘agreed’ and ‘satisfied’. Incredibly misleading.
**Note that when respondents typically aren’t sure about their feedback but are obligated to choose a response, they tend to choose ‘somewhat satisfied’, as well as respondents who weren’t necessarily happy about the product. Also, even if they got real teachers using the tool to respond accurately, there’s a huge sampling bias when trying to evaluate GoGuardian’s effectiveness. Either a) they catch students distracted while on GoGuardian and believe it’s great for detecting wrongdoing, or b) the students still seek distractions, just do it under the radar, not showing up on the GoGuardian admin screen, tricking teachers into believing nobody’s distracted at all, and GoGuardian is now making sure all students are productive.
How did GoGuardian succeed?
A verbatim excerpt from their website landing page tells you that, “Policy templates, audit logs, role-based access controls, and detailed reporting help your school with compliance and federal regulations like FERPA and COPPA. Plus, we can help school districts achieve CIPA compliance.” These few lines are the main rationale behind districts paying for tens of thousands of GoGuardian subscriptions. Schools are mandated by the government to achieve some sort of compliance with regulations like FERPA, COPPA, and CIPA. FERPA and COPPA are just regulations making it so parents have access to their children’s education records, and consent must be given before collecting children's data. CIPA is the Children’s Internet Privacy Act, passed in 2000, and mandates that all schools have a way to filter online content in a way that makes it so children can’t be exposed to illicit material. Schools need a way to make it look like they’re doing something to ensure that they comply with federal tech safety regulations. In public schools, especially, failure to do so would have unprecedented consequences for the school’s personnel and funding.
GoGuardian was and still remains the most straightforward way to achieve that compliance, doing the bare minimum but also paying for the bare minimum, alleviating the burden placed upon administrators to direct funds towards compliance. Actual plans fluctuate based on the services you’re using and the scale you’re using it at, but usually, schools only have to pay $13.50 per student, per year. That’s a really good deal, amounting to less than a buck and a half per month for the 10-month school year. There’s also a laundry list of other reasons why GoGuardian was able to claim its spot as the leading child spyware brand– it was directly integrated into Chrome as an extension, meaning it was highly compatible with G Suite, (which schools used since it was a cheap, all-in-one bundle with apps like docs and classroom) was relatively inexpensive, and was literally given for FREE to schools during COVID-19, allowing GoGuardian to integrate itself into school ecosystems. With schools struggling to stay afloat during the pandemic, a school-wide subscription to a digital education tool, devoid of any price tag, was an insane deal for most educators.
Conclusion?
GoGuardian had a revenue of $147 million in 2024, an order of magnitude higher than its revenue just 7 years prior—in 2017, it only raked in 14.7 million in revenue. GoGuardian watches over 27 million students in total. 50% of the K-12 student population in the U.S. is monitored by their digital spyware products. There are so many companies that are taking advantage of the education system’s reliance on tech, companies just like GoGuardian, companies such as Securly, Gaggle, and Lightspeed. (The examples mentioned should be taken with a grain of salt since I haven’t done any research into them yet) These companies take advantage of an ecosystem where doing the bare minimum is the norm, all while criticisms are far and few. The U.S. education sector needs to understand that there’s more to productive learning than fulfilling curriculum quotas and abiding by stringent federal regulations. If they really want to increase child productivity and create an effective learning environment, it requires a lot more dedication than just purchasing a software subscription and booting up GoGuardian.
Changing the way students are ultimately going to act in the classroom requires more pedagogical development, more than just a watered-down site blocker paired with a web tracker. It feels futile to try and make a change in an industry dominated by disingenuous progress. It feels so much easier for administrators and teachers to work within the current system, to convince themselves that real progress can be made without a progressive reformation of the education system. Educational professionals, in the large majority of cases, are overworked and underpaid—but in the present day, we need them more than ever to serve, once again, as the backbone of society. A single company like GoGuardian, a single expense of a few bucks per student, is a sign of what not to do. It’s yet another sign that in the status quo, too many districts are going nowhere.
"This is how scummy educational companies like Collegeboard and GoGuardian operate—they operate off of ignorance, a willingness from parents and adults to tell you to ‘just do your work’, that sometimes you have to swallow a pill, to take the only route forward in education."
absolutely true, companies like these are turning so called necessities into for-profit fees. Education is the easiet market to target for many because, with the belief of it being necessary, it can be easily implemented in the forms of fees. Take CollegeBoard for example, has 113 mil left after expenses, holds more than a billion in securities, with the majority being NON program related, and also lost 162 million in funds over investments. It's still a "non profit". Ignorance = profit for these companies.
Absolute cinema