Leah Plunkett

There was plenty of high drama at the recent US Senate hearing about child sexual exploitation on social media sites. But after the dust settled,…

When students at Stevens High School in Claremont arrive at school this year, they must immediately surrender use of their phones. First, they must turn…

I’ve never met Lucy Huber, but I (and the more than 70,000 other people who follow her on X, formerly known as Twitter) know about…

Think about some of your favorite online content on TikTok, YouTube and Instagram. Does any of it feature kids? Illinois’ new first-in-the-nation child labor law…

When Mark Zuckerberg shared a photo on Instagram of his family on July 4, two things stuck out: the billionaire CEO wore a striped souvenir…

With the recent spate of privacy-focused investigations, government regulators may be looking to send Big Tech a message — and it’s landing in Seattle’s tech-fueled…

Amom has been cheered for asking her family not to post pictures of her child on social media. In a post on London-based Internet forum…

To the 94 million people that use it every month, storytelling platform Wattpad touts itself as a safe space for education and community on the…

“You’re paying my bills,” MJ told the audience, running a finger over her mouth. “$35 for a flash,” one viewer responded. Another asked how much to send to her Cash App. As she posed and pursed her lips, her long blonde hair draped over her tight black bralette, some asked MJ to show them her feet. “I’m 68 and you owe me one,” one attendee told her as more requests piled on. These exchanges did not take place between adults at a nightclub; they took place on TikTok Live, where MJ, who said she was 14 years old, was broadcasting with friends to 2,000 strangers on a recent Saturday night. A Forbes review of hundreds of recent TikTok livestreams reveals how viewers regularly use the comments to urge young girls to perform acts that appear to toe the line of child pornography — rewarding those who oblige with TikTok gifts, which can be redeemed for money, or off-platform payments to Venmo, PayPal or Cash App accounts that users list in their TikTok profiles. It’s “the digital equivalent of going down the street to a strip club filled with 15-year-olds,” says Leah Plunkett, an assistant dean at Harvard Law School and faculty associate at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, focused on youth and media. Imagine a local joint putting a bunch of minors on a stage before a live adult audience that is actively giving them money to perform whatever G, PG or PG-13 activities they request, she said. “That is sexual exploitation. But that's exactly what TikTok is doing here.”

Schools are relying heavily on technology—from videoconferencing programs to digital-teaching tools and temperature-taking apps—to educate children safely in the age of Covid. But this rapid deployment of new technology means schools are collecting a lot more personal data on students. And that is raising some troubling questions about who has access to the data, how it is being used and whether it is being kept safe. Infrastructure for protecting students’ personal data wasn’t that sound to begin with, says Leah Plunkett, a Meyer Research Lecturer at Harvard Law School, who likens the current situation to building something “using duct tape on top of Legos.” The federal law governing student privacy dates back to 1974, and while some states have more stringent laws, sufficient funding to implement those statutes is often lacking, she says. And many public schools lack the technical expertise or personnel to deal with student-data privacy, she adds. Technology companies often want to keep their data analytics and algorithms proprietary, which can make it difficult for outsiders to see what information is being collected, how it is being used and if it is ever deleted. Schools, meanwhile, increasingly have become targets of cyberattacks.