FARO stands for Frontline Record of Online Harms. Technology-related harm usually reaches the public one case at a time: a school in one country, a family in another, each easy to treat as an exception. This directory puts those cases side by side to help grassroots actors see where others face the same issues they do, and to help governments and regulators see the bigger picture of the harms occurring. The directory describes what its records contain. It does not measure how often these harms occur, and a country with few records may simply have little published about it.
How to use this directory: Topics are filterable for FARO reports that have already been created based on these incidents. The harms and response patterns shown are those featured there. To see the incidents used in a country-specific report, choose that country under Country report. Pick a pattern or evidence type to see on the map which countries have matching records. Click a country on the map or in the list to see its records below. Use the filter to search for keywords or specific sources.
Shaded countries have at least one record. Choose a pattern to see where it appears.
Shading shows only that a country has at least one record in this directory that matches your selection, and every shaded country looks the same on purpose. It says nothing about how often these harms occur there. Pattern filters only cover records classified so far, and small countries are easy to miss on a map, so use the list as well.
In the list but not drawn on the map: Multiple countries, Not stated.
A school received blackmail threats connected to AI-manipulated images of children, resulting in safeguarding concerns and law enforcement warnings.
View sourceA contributor says they spent over six months on the platform, completing large amounts of unpaid onboarding tasks, fulfilled all requirements and work, and were never paid. They say the platform then found an issue with their account and blocked it, and support did nothing to help them receive their money.
View sourceA parent in North West England reported that a secondary school introduced a mandatory iPad scheme requiring Year 7 students to purchase a £600 device or enter a three-year payment plan. The school stated that the device was required to access the curriculum and initially told the family that there were no alternatives. The parent, concerned about affordability in a low-income community, questioned whether requiring families to fund an expensive school-managed device was appropriate or lawful.
View sourceA worker says their balance was in the multiple four-figure range when the platform locked the account on the seventh day and asked them to justify submitted tasks. They say they supplied proof, and after two weeks there was still no reply to emails or social media messages. The account stayed under review and the earned balance was out of reach.
View sourceA primary school student in Scotland was left traumatized after being exposed to explicit content on a school-issued laptop. The exposure occurred when classmates searched for a medical term on their Chromebooks, bypassing the school's safety filtering system while connected to the school Wi-Fi. The child's parent reported that multiple children were exposed to the material, causing them distress and confusion.
View sourceA female private maths tutor tutored a teenage boy online and then arranged to meet him at her home, where she had sexual contact with him while aware he was under the age of consent. The boy's mother found inappropriate WhatsApp messages on his phone in May 2023. The tutor pleaded guilty and was jailed for six years at a court in the United Kingdom in August 2024; police said the abuse had a significant impact on the boy and his family.
View sourceSensitive personal and special-category safeguarding information relating to four individuals including three children was disclosed in a classroom environment through school systems. Children were exposed to confidential information not intended for them resulting in a personal data breach.
View sourceA parent reported removing digital devices from their child for mental health reasons, after which the child's school continued to rely on online-only homework systems and was unwilling or unable to provide equivalent paper-based work. The parent cited the incident as an example of increasing dependence on digital platforms in schools.
View sourceHackers accessed surveillance cameras at several schools and livestreamed video feeds online. Students captured on the cameras experienced a privacy breach. This is a personal interview. Source available to SHIELD.
View sourceA male secondary school student in the United Kingdom received a school detention for failing to complete his homework through a mandatory reading application. The school required all reading to be logged through the software, which strictly limits book selection, controls reading speed, and requires completing AI-generated quizzes. The student ultimately chose to accept recurring weekly detentions instead of using the application, which his parents argued ruined his enjoyment of reading.
View sourceA high school in the United Kingdom introduced facial recognition technology for student catering services. Students were processed under an opt-out consent model and no DPIA was completed before deployment. The ICO found that students were deprived of the ability to properly exercise their rights and freedoms in relation to the processing between March and November 2023.
View sourceEach record is a short summary of an incident described in a public source or collected through an interview by SHIELD or its partners. Records are reviewed by people before they appear here. Names and identifying details are removed: where a person appears, a role, age band and gender stand in for the name, and dates and places for minors are generalised. Every record links to its original source and shows the date that link was last checked. Records are classified with shared harm categories. The classification is SHIELD's own, so it can differ from how a source describes the incident.
You are welcome to read, link to and quote individual records with credit to FARO. Please do not copy, scrape or republish the dataset in bulk, or use it to train or test automated systems, without written permission. To ask for permission, use the SHIELD contact form. The original sources keep their own rights, and the link on each record leads to them.
SHIELD-APS. Frontline Record of Online Harms (FARO). DIRECTORY-URL. Accessed [date]. To cite a particular selection, use the web address shown after you set the filters.
When you rely on the facts of an incident, cite the original source it links to. When you rely on the classification, the patterns or the country report, cite FARO. Please describe the records as documented incidents and do not present counts or country coverage as how often these harms happen. A country with few records may simply have little published about it.
If a record is wrong, a link no longer works, or you are described in a record and want it changed or removed, use the SHIELD contact form and include the title of the record. We review each request and update or remove the record where the request is justified.
Know of a documented incident that belongs here? Send it through the incident form. A public source, such as a news report, a court or regulator decision, or a research publication, helps us verify it quickly. Submissions without a public source are kept anonymous and are not tied to named products or companies. Please leave out the names of children and of anyone who has not agreed to be named. Submissions are reviewed before anything is published, and sending one does not guarantee a record.
