'I'm afraid': critics of anti-cheating technology for students hit by lawsuits

In 2020, a Canadian university employee named Ian Linkletter became increasingly alarmed by a new kind of technology that was exploding in use with the pandemic. It was meant to detect cheating by college and high-school students taking tests at home, and claimed to work by watching students' movements and analyzing sounds around them through their webcams and microphones to automatically flag suspicious behavior. So Linkletter accessed a section of the website of one of the anti-cheating companies, named Proctorio, intended only for instructors and administrators. He shared what he found on social media. Now Linkletter, who became a prominent critic of the technology, has been sued by the company. But he is not the only one.