Internet Safety Labs (ISL) announced in a news release Monday that its App Microscope is available to anyone free of charge. The online search function has information on 1,722 mobile apps that appeared in ISL’s 2022 K-12 Edtech Safety Benchmark report, based on survey data from 455,000 students in 663 schools across all 50 states. ISL expects to add to that list regularly.
The same query function is available to policymakers, administrators, educators, parents, students and anyone else who visits the App Microscope page. For any app that appears in the search, the website’s listing includes a safety label denoting a level of risk — some risk, high risk or very high risk. The function doesn’t have a “no risk” category, and apps that are for purchase, broken, or require school login credentials are not scored.
When people want to know what is in something, from cars to clothes to food, they look at the label. We think it is rather shocking that there are no independent safety labels for the technology we all use every day, and we are working to change that.
Internet Safety Labs Executive Director Lisa LeVasseur
This initiative follows a two-part report from ISL in the past year that indicated 96 percent of apps used in schools share student information with third parties. The report also said 86 percent of the schools surveyed did not have policies in place for obtaining parental consent pertaining to applications that share student information, and more than 70 percent of surveyed schools said they do not vet all technologies used by students.
“When people want to know what is in something, from cars to clothes to food, they look at the label. We think it is rather shocking that there are no independent safety labels for the technology we all use every day, and we are working to change that,” ISL Executive Director Lisa LeVasseur said in a public statement. “We are all about radical transparency, and our research and new App Microscope demonstrate our aim to blow the lid off the deep dark secrets in our every-day technology. We all deserve to know what’s inside.”
App Microscope was funded by the Internet Society Foundation, according to an announcement in May. ISL, based in San Diego, is an independent software safety-testing organization whose work covers various industries in addition to education, including product research, policy advocacy, product audits and the development of standards, according to the news release.
