Even as I write this it is hard to know whether Gaggle is watching, but in my heart I fear it might be. 

Gaggle has eyes just about everywhere. It sees your emails, scans your Google Docs, looks at your photos, watches your videos, reads your calendar alerts and even. And in the past year, it’s done some baffling things in pursuit of its promise to ‘save lives.’

Among them, it has suggested the reporting of school-appropriate images to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. It caused an unnecessary lockdown at Free State High School. However, most in my journey toward understanding these already questionable problems, Gaggle prevented data about itself from arriving in my inbox.

Gaggle was pitched as a virtually harmless A.I. surveillance tool that would help facilitate student safety by sending documents with trigger words to company representatives. Big concerns would then be sent to school administrators for further investigation.

Gaggle has scanned millions of files since being implemented in November 2023. As of September 1,246 incidents were reported as questionable content, or the higher tier of concern called ‘Possible Student Situation’ (PSS) which is supposed to signal a higher level of urgency for responding.
While the data indicate that Gaggle may have been helpful in some student situations, it has also caused several issues. 

In the early days of Gaggle, Free State senior Cooper Hefty was poking fun at a debate assignment. Hefty typed an email joking about bombing the school if they didn’t win. A short time later, the school went on lockdown.

“I didn't know anyone that was super upset by it, at least that I spoke to,” Hefty said. “But I know that most of the time when lockdowns happen, there are people who are nervous. I remember my mom texting me and being like, ‘Is everything OK?’”

Hefty was never told if their message caused the lockdown, but they were called to the office later that morning to discuss their email. Hefty believes that this degree of surveillance is harmful because of the content it tends to censor. Until 2023, Gaggle was triggered by LGBTQ-related words and phrases like “gay” or “lesbian.”

According to the New York Times, this is a concern that spans over all monitoring technology platforms where parents are the first to be contacted in higher level concern alerts. This has the potential to do more harm than good for students.

“If the parents have a hard time accepting mental health issues, they might handle it wrong which is never good,” Hefty said.

It’s unclear how district administrators handle the difficult questions that arise when alerts happen, even after reviewing months of data, (in which students names are redacted but the basic issues that led to incidents are detailed.)

The overwhelming majority of alerts turn out to be non-issues — at least 64 percent.. More than 11 percent of reported incidents didn’t show how the issue was resolved. For the nearly 25 percent of incidents in which the district reports the threat was addressed, the level of threat is unclear. Sometimes, notes detail that no threat was found after an investigation, but they are still labeled as ‘threat addressed.’

Sometimes it is hard to consider it a threat at all.

Early this year, an administrator noted the ‘threat was addressed’ after a student was pulled in for using the trigger phrase “want to die.” The problem? They had been running around in Crocs while taking the Pacer test in PE. They were advised to be more careful with word choice.

In other instances, administration has noted the word “kill” being flagged when referencing the desire to stamp out an annoying fly.

It is situations like these that call into question the consistency of the data records. There are no clear guidelines for what ‘threat addressed’ is referring to, meaning that data being pulled by the company itself could be misconstrued and ill-informed.

Last year, a group of LHS editors persisted in a lengthy battle to protect the First Amendment rights of student journalists. Although the battle did not end with the revocation of the program, they did come to an agreement: journalism students would be exempt from Gaggle monitoring.
I was not convinced.

While conducting research for this very analysis of Gaggle impact on students, I went through a common journalistic process of making an open records request.

I composed a statement requesting data recording the date, reason for the trigger and resolution to each case, without the names of students to district members with access to the data. This process legally requires a written response within three days with either the data, the reason for the delay, or the reason the information is being withheld. 

The response was almost instantaneous, but the data I received was a printout of the Gaggle companies website policies, not what I requested. After specifying the district relayed that the data I was looking for would take more time. A week later they notified me saying she sent over the data, however, I had no new records in my possession.

I thought I was being patronized, that the data she originally sent me was the only thing she had managed to gather entirely. When questioned, they reassured me the data had been sent. Then, they stopped responding to my emails entirely. 

Confused and frustrated, I pestered them with more emails, but I didn't receive a response until almost a month later… and it was from my journalism advisor.

The district had CC'd her onto the email, with an excel sheet of data, and the statement “I am curious whether Gaggle is preventing you from receiving my emails because of the nature of the words in the data you requested.”

My jaw dropped.

Gaggle had just gagged Gaggle, a tongue twister on the lips but a situation that ties real life up in knots even more.

As a perfectionist, one of my worst fears is the disappearance of digital documentation and Gaggle had just realized this fear.

While these situations may seem like minor inconveniences to the untrained eye, the threat to students' First and Fourth amendment rights, censorship, and the increased lockdown drills are under any circumstances not normal.

As a student body, we have accepted this level of government monitoring as reality. We cannot normalize this type of government interference, especially in the midst of such a dynamic power shift at the helm of our country. We’ve seen them push the limits already.

Change only starts with one person. Although A.I technology is a new system to navigate, it does not take away our rights. 

Take this into consideration: How much control do you want the government to have over monitoring your documents?

It all starts at a local level. Gaggle may be just the beginning.