Online proctoring companies employ a lengthy list of dangerous monitoring and tracking techniques in an attempt to determine whether or not students are potentially cheating, many of which are biased and ineffective. This week, one of the more invasive techniques—the “room scan”—was correctly deemed unconstitutional by a federal judge. “Room scans” are a common requirement in proctored exams where students are forced to use their device’s camera to give a 360-degree view of everything around the area in which they’re taking a test. Often, this is a personal residence, and frequently a private space, like a bedroom. (A demonstration of a room scan by Proctorio can be seen here.)
We have criticized room scans as well as many other dangerous aspects of online proctoring. In addition to these room scans, remote proctoring tools often record keystrokes and use facial recognition to supposedly confirm whether the student signing up for a test is the one taking it; they frequently include gaze-monitoring or eye-tracking and face detection that claims to determine if the student is focusing on the screen; they gather personally identifiable information (PII), sometimes including scans of government-issued identity documents; and they frequently collect device logs, including IP addresses, records of URLs visited, and how long students remain on a particular site or webpage. These automated tools are hugely privacy invasive and can easily penalize students who don’t have control over their surroundings, or those with less functional hardware or low-
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