There is a hidden monster in plenty of schools. It scurries through your personal information like a child's hands in a candy jar. It is not a rat in your locker, it is not a homeless person who lives in the janitor's closet, and it is not a supervillain that can phase through walls. It is a teaching device known as Lanschool, used for monitoring student screens.

Lanschool is a major problem in most modern school systems. It is a mix of a keylogger and spyware. However, it is completely legal in most areas. Teachers use it for real-time snapshots of your screen in order to “see if you need help”. Really, it is just to make sure you aren't looking at Inappropriate graphics or playing Battle Fish or Fortnite while you are supposed to be writing an essay on spooky ghost bears (speaking of which, Battle Fish is a great game, you should play it!). However, data is stored on local servers and if you are a "instructor or a school administrator"  you can “request access to, review, and receive a copy of your personal information or a student’s personal information” . So, as any teacher you can look at any student's personal information. This means a teacher with bad intentions could take your information and then leave.

In some cases, information would not be stored purposefully on local servers, but some still can be accessed. For example, if you were a hacker, you still could get plenty of information. Here ́s an example: You are a scary hacker dude, and you hack with your hacking abilities into a teacher's computer. You then head to a Lanschool application, where you know there should be a treasure trove of people’s data. You poke around, looking illegally at student screens, when you notice somebody on Scratch, a coding website. You quickly check their records, and find the password that was used to get into the account via the keylogging service. You then access their Gmail, which uses the same password and almost the exact same username, due to how my school sets up accounts, and then have free range of all of that student's information, in just about 5 minutes of work. And, I am sure that most people use that password for even more things, too. So much information, so easy. Our data and futures should not be stored without our knowledge. But let us continue this story. You get the information, do whatever you needed to, and then  do it some more, in a different location, and rinse and repeat. A number of years later, you check on that person you exploited just for fun, to see what they have become. You are surprised to find out that they use the same Gmail, and that there’s recent emails there. You soon realize that they are the owner of a fairly profitable start-up. Well, now you have access to their Gmail, and therefore whatever you want, and plenty of money too. Next thing that former student knows, they are out on the streets with their two kids and wife/husband without any clue what happened. All because of a silly, but exploitable program from middle school.

But it is not just hackers that can exploit you and your data. It is Lanschool itself, too.

In the Lanschool Privacy Policy (with Clever integration), Lanschool says directly that information is shared with third parties. It says, and I quote, “Yes – Stoneware contracts with other companies who act as our suppliers to perform services for Stoneware, such as data hosting, processing, product development and analytics. Such services may require Stoneware to share your information with our agents. In such cases, we take steps to ensure that these suppliers to Stoneware are adhering to Stoneware’s standards for privacy and security.” Note that Lanschool does not specify who those agents are, and so you think you understand but at the same time you are left in the dark. Nothing you put into a computer that is monitored my Lanschool is safe, and your data is probably already all over the globe.

Some privacy-hating people might think that Lanschool is perfectly healthy, and would never harm a soul. I am not directly going to argue with you, but instead point out some facts and make witty comments about them. Lenovo, the owner of Stoneware, the owner of Lanschool is actually owned by a chinese multinational company. What is people’s data doing crossing borders, hmm? Stoneware, a computer related company, sold fairly recently some laptops that had malware (Superfish, ever heard of it?) on them. Su-u-uper trustworthy, I can tell. Lenovo was also accused of plagiarising someone’s own laptop creation video as their own concept idea, and by accused I mean there were legitimate watermarks that showed that it was not theirs. Great company history.

You now know that Lanschool is a menace. However, at my school, none of the students did, either. For the first year of my Lanschool experience, I had no idea that it was on the computers I was on or what it was doing. Yes, I saw the little “ask a question” window, but I thought that was all it was. For questions. This means that our data was being farmed without our knowledge or consent. When Lanschool got an update that made it ask your permission to share your screen (not really, if you said no it would pop back up milliseconds after asking again!), I finally knew what it was up to, and that I was losing my data. 

That is why I am asking you to sign this petition, so I can stop Lanschool from exploiting our data and ruining our futures, your children’s futures, and maybe even your grandchildren’s futures. Even if you are no longer in school, this still affects you and you personally. Thank you for your time, and please consider signing to stop this menace.