In December 2019, teachers at a high school in Italy noticed that grades on the register did not match the ones they had given. The suspected students were called in and confessed; 15 students were suspended with the obligation to attend lessons and were reported to the postal police for unauthorised access (an allegation). Teachers first noticed the discrepancy. Responses acted on the students. Whether register access security was changed is not stated in the source.

A 15-year-old boy is alleged to have changed grades, turning 5s into 6s, from his home in Italy, and to have interfered with tanker routes in the Mediterranean; he was identified through an investigation coordinated by the Polizia Postale and the prosecutor and was reported (an allegation). The Ministero dell'Istruzione e del Merito said checks showed no access to its own systems, that the case most likely involved the electronic register, and that each school chooses and contracts its register supplier autonomously. The Ministry said it was in contact with the Polizia Postale and urged schools to keep attention on digital security. Who first noticed is not stated in source beyond a complaint that opened the file. Whether the register was changed is not stated in source.

In the 2015/2016 school year, students at a high school in the Marche region, Italy, used stolen teachers' passwords to change attendance and grades on the school register. The high number of changes made the teaching staff suspicious. The school head reported the incident to the postal police, whose investigation identified 23 girls and 11 boys.

A group of data workers completed accepted tasks but received no payment after a project owner withdrew.

A reviewer with a 5.0 rating says they lost account access and were permanently deactivated for an alleged guidelines violation with no details. They say about 100 dollars in earnings was withheld and support called the decision final. BBB shows no company response to the review.

Members of the activist group Anonymous for the Voiceless, invited by email for an educational talk on animal welfare, connected computers in a primary school classroom in Sardinia, Italy, and projected graphic footage of industrial slaughterhouses and intensive farming. According to the report, many children cried, showed distress and tried to close their eyes, and teachers removed the group from the building. The head teacher said the school had been deceived, and a parent who is a municipal councillor said he intended to file complaints.

A parent of a high-school student in Italy first raised the issue, and a national newspaper published an investigation in March 2025 showing the MyTools section held games, links to commercial sites and paid services such as student loans and study trips. The Minister of Education called it unacceptable, and in April 2025 the Ministry sent all schools and regional school offices a circular barring marketing, transfers of data to third parties, mini-games and ad banners in registers, and requiring register data to be portable. Spaggiari made the partner services unavailable until each school re-confirmed its consent, keeping only educational content. The responses acted on the company and its tool, and on every school nationally. The source says the tool was changed.

An adult male worker received payment from an AI training platform into a wallet account, which was then limited after his identity document was rejected as an unsupported format. He states he has no other accepted identification and requested a one-time withdrawal to retrieve his funds and close the account, but support has not offered a workable solution.

An adult user in Nigeria attempted to verify their account following a digital payment platform's relaunch announcement. The system repeatedly generated error messages, resulting in the user's access to their money being blocked without explanation.

A data worker withdrew earnings through a Nigerian payment platform using local agents and experienced a delayed payout.

A 35-year-old female data annotator worked under precarious conditions training generative artificial intelligence models. She was exposed to highly disturbing content, such as suicide and violence, for over 12 hours a day without psychological support. Additionally, following a payment system update, one of her subcontracted employers failed to pay her approximately $900, which represented three months of her labor.

Schools adopted an AI mental health monitoring platform and concerns were raised regarding accuracy privacy and automated assessment of students.

A freelance worker spent hundreds of hours completing over 80 unpaid onboarding processes, training tutorials, and assessment tasks required by an AI training platform. After finishing the extensive training requirements, the projects disappeared entirely from the worker's dashboard, resulting in zero compensation for their labor and causing severe emotional distress due to a lack of communication from the platform.

A worker on an AI training platform says they usually earned 100 to 200 dollars a week, then reached about 500 dollars in one week and were banned before the payout. They say the platform later emailed to confirm the payment would be withheld. They say they had no violation, VPN or proxy use.

A worker on an AI training platform has 1,023 dollars blocked in a payment wallet’s identity verification after the platform banned their account. The source relays this as one worker’s report and gives no further detail.

A private school generated questionable AI lessons and extensively monitored students through video systems leading staff to raise concerns. This data was stored in a Google Drive and available to anyone with the link.

A school received blackmail threats connected to AI-manipulated images of children, resulting in safeguarding concerns and law enforcement warnings.

Several students at an Andorran primary school used school-provided digital devices to access sexual content shortly before the Sant Joan holiday. The incident was discovered by a teacher during school activities and reported to school leadership, which escalated the matter to the Ministry of Education. According to government spokesperson Guillem Casal, the access was linked to a change in Google's security policies that affected existing protections on the devices. The ministry removed the devices and plans to review and reconfigure them to ensure they are properly secured before the start of the next school year.

A female data annotator and her husband annotated data for about a year. The platform operator stopped paying wages and six months later they had still received nothing.

An annotator reported wages were cut after a project moved to Africa and pay per microtask had halved since 2022.

A mother of two in Murwillumbah, New South Wales, said she took part in remote education on trust that the school had looked into the privacy implications, and that she was not asked for consent or told how her children's rights might be protected or affected. She said she saw little the family could do about it anyway, because they were focused on making schooling work during the pandemic.

A psychologist stated that he has observed children as young as seven or eight years old consuming pornography and reported associated behaviors including explicit sexual play, inappropriate touching of girls, and excessive masturbation among children in multiple schools. The statement was presented as a professional observation based on clinical and educational experience rather than as a single documented incident with a specific date, school, or technology pathway.

An adult man signed up his brother and nephew, both male students, for a Byju's engineering preparation course in June 2022, paying a Rs 15,000 registration fee after months of telesales calls. The two students found the classes unsatisfactory and requested cancellation within ten days of the 15-day trial. Almost two months later the refund had not been paid, and he said the company only responded after he posted about it on social media.

In May 2022, a male relative enrolled a 12-year-old girl, a 7th-grade student, in a three-year Byju's tutoring course costing Rs 93,000, taking a loan option offered by the company after being told he could cancel within 15 days for a full refund. The student left the course after ten days when she was assigned teachers for four subjects instead of six. According to the report, the relative received only a Rs 5,000 refund, his first-month payment of about Rs 7,700 was not refunded, and his request to close the loan account was still pending.

A female second-grade student in California, United States, accessed several adult pornography videos on her school-issued iPad, which her mother discovered. The local school district's IT department subsequently reviewed the browser history of iPads across five elementary schools and found that several other students in the same classroom had also accessed inappropriate content. A district associate superintendent described the likely pathway as beginning with a YouTube search that led to unfiltered results. The mother has requested extensive IT training for school staff responsible for monitoring student device use.

A mother and her minor children were required to use the Seesaw Platform at a public school in California, USA, which generated and collected extensive private student data. This data was subsequently shared with numerous third-party entities without parental consent. As a result of these invasive data practices, the mother was ultimately forced to withdraw her children from the school district to protect their privacy and well-being.

CBC Kids, a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation website recommended by Quebec's Education Ministry for pre-primary and primary children, sent children's data to 20 advertising and marketing companies through 29 ad trackers and 15 third-party cookies. Seven of those companies are registered in California as data brokers, and six offer services that match website visitors to identity records such as physical addresses and credit scores. The privacy policy says CBC profiles users and does behavioral advertising but does not name the companies receiving children's data. CBC told HRW its kids section is ad free and that several trackers were inactive or used for site performance, which HRW could not corroborate.

A parent discovered that a school had automatically enrolled their child in a mental health application before notifying the family. According to the parent, the child's personal information had already been shared with a technology provider for research and development purposes. The consequence was unauthorized disclosure of the child's data. This is a personal interview. Source available to SHIELD.

A parent reported that a 6-year-old child viewed violent movie trailers through a platform used at school. Following the exposure, the child began experiencing nightmares. The parent questioned the educational use of the platform after the incident. This is a personal interview. Source available to SHIELD.

A child sexual abuse video reached a middle school class chat after a pupil forwarded material received in a game chat. The judicial authority ordered the content to be deleted from all the phones of the children involved, restoring the devices to factory settings.

A child became fearful of digital harassment after misuse of a publicly identifiable YouTube account. This is a personal interview. Source available to SHIELD.

During a supervised lesson, pupils in a primary school in Italy typed a search term into school PCs that had no filter and, as some pupils later reported, saw pornographic and fetish images; the teacher believed blocking was active. The parents' group Moige said it would ask the Ministry for an inventory of school IT security, and the Ministry said supplier choice, installation and maintenance are the responsibility of head teachers. Parents mobilised to find out what happened. Who first noticed is not stated in source beyond pupils later describing it. Whether a filter was installed afterwards is not stated in source.

Children received devices with visible login credentials attached via stickers. This is a personal interview. Source available to SHIELD.

MUSE, an app for kindergarten to fifth grade built by SABAQ Learning Systems and recommended by Pakistan's federal education ministry, was found by HRW to send children's data to Facebook and Google through six embedded SDKs. HRW said the app sends more data about children to Facebook and Google than it sends to itself, and that Facebook's SDKs log students' activity in the virtual classroom and send it with the child's advertising ID, Android ID and device information, which allows Facebook to tie the data together. MUSE's privacy policy does not disclose the practices HRW observed. MUSE told HRW it does not collect children-specific data and that the Google and Facebook SDKs gather usage data as data points, not about specific users.

HRW found 30 educational websites sending their users' data to Facebook through the Facebook Pixel, which collects information about what students and teachers do on the sites and sends it back to Facebook. Twenty-seven of the 30 are designed specifically for children, and all were recommended by governments for online learning. The report says Facebook could use such data to profile children and target behavioral advertisements at them.

HRW's forensic testing found that MUSE notified Facebook the moment the app was installed, and sent the child's advertising ID and device information to Facebook before the child had opened the app for the first time. This happens whether or not the child is logged into Facebook or has an account. HRW also conclusively found MUSE collecting and sending bridged identifiers (advertising ID with Wi-Fi MAC address) to Facebook, which bypasses privacy controls such as resetting the advertising ID.

Notesmaster, listed by HRW among 56 government-built or government-financed educational products found transmitting children's data to advertising technology companies, sent its students' data to Oracle's BlueKai through ad trackers and cookies, both before and after BlueKai's reported 2020 data breach, which reportedly exposed billions of people's personal data. HRW also found key logging on the site, sending data to youtube.com.

A class action lawsuit was filed on behalf of K-12 students, including a minor student plaintiff, alleging that Curriculum Associates generated, collected, used, and shared their personal information without consent through its i-Ready products. The complaint claims these practices violated federal and state privacy laws, including the Federal Wiretap Act, the California Invasion of Privacy Act, and the Massachusetts Right to Privacy Act [1.1].

A WhatsApp class chat at a secondary school in Italy was used to post pornographic videos, extremist content and insulting videos of teachers. Six students were reported and suspended.

An adult male platform user says he received 3,828.73 dollars from a client through a wallet platform on 23 July 2026 and withdrew 2,472.22 dollars. The platform blocked his account the next day without explanation, leaving the remaining balance inaccessible. Two weeks later, support had given no meaningful response.

Parents objected to a circular stating that students without an iPad should continue their studies at another school, with devices required from the third grade of primary and the first year of lower secondary school. The female school principal defended the policy, citing the national digital school plan's "Bring Your Own Device" action, and stated that the school lends devices to foreign and lower-income families. Whether the requirement changed is not stated in the source.

A compulsory device costing nearly €1,000 repeatedly failed and stopped working before the first school year ended; no refund was provided.

A father of two school-age sons bought a Byju's online course in November 2022 by taking a Rs 1,00,000 loan. In August 2023, an agent told him the sons had been selected for an add-on premium course under a scholarship programme, said to be offline and ICSE-aligned, and collected Rs 42,000; the course was CBSE-based and online. Byju's approved a refund but did not pay it; the commission found deficiency in service and unfair trade practice and ordered a refund with 9 percent interest, Rs 10,000 compensation and Rs 10,000 costs.

A mother paid Rs 85,000 in August 2023 for a Byju's college entrance exam preparation course for her adolescent son, taking a personal loan with a monthly EMI of Rs 6,084. According to the report, no study material or promised laptop arrived, and after being promised a full refund within 30 days she received Rs 1. A regional Consumer Disputes Redressal Commission in Telangana, India ordered a refund of Rs 84,999 with 12 percent interest and Rs 10,000 compensation.

A parent enrolled her teenage son in a three-year Byju's foundation course for secondary school students in October 2023, paying a portion of the fee by credit card with the remainder scheduled as installments. She alleged classes did not start for weeks, recorded content was presented as live classes, the tablet arrived late, and promised payment terms were not met. A district consumer commission in Telangana, India ordered a refund and compensation.

A father purchased a Byju's learning programme for his daughter, paying Rs 5,000 upfront and financing the remaining Rs 60,000 through a loan from a private finance company that, according to the consumer commission's order, was arranged by a Byju's authorised representative. After deciding within the promised 15-day trial period that his daughter was dissatisfied with the learning app, he requested cancellation and paid an additional Rs 9,498 cancellation charge. Despite assurances that no further payments would be deducted, EMI deductions reportedly continued. In September 2023, the Hooghly District Consumer Disputes Redressal Commission found indications of unfair trade practices, ordered Byju's to refund the course amount and cancellation fee, and awarded Rs 5,000 in compensation for harassment and mental agony.

An adult content creator who has received monthly royalty payouts from a stock-image service and a social video platform for over four years says his withdrawable balance dropped to zero after annual fee deductions. He says a royalty payout was then rejected by the payment platform and bounced back to the sender. Support closed his ticket as resolved without investigating, and he cannot reach his money.

A contractor says their Outlier account was deactivated by an automated flag and that 127.65 dollars in earnings for about 17 hours of work is being withheld. They report scripted support replies described as final. BBB lists the complaint as Unanswered by the business.

A contractor says their account was deactivated without a stated reason and that 300 dollars in pending earnings was not processed. No response to their support contacts is described. BBB lists the complaint as Unanswered by the business.

A contractor says the platform disabled their account for alleged GPT usage although they handwrite their work, and that the platform is now withholding their payouts. The amount is not stated. BBB lists the complaint as Unanswered by the business.