LOS ANGELES – School officials and technology companies are touting the benefits of electronic eavesdropping on students as a means of preventing teen suicides, but privacy rights experts are ringing the alarms.

Ken Yeh, a technology director at a private Los Angles school, recently detailed for National Public Radio how administrators who doled out Chromebook laptops to students are tracking their browsing and search histories using software designed to block out porn and other internet sites.

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Yeh explained that GoGuardian software installed on the computers alerts school IT professionals when students search for suicide-related terms or visit websites about self-harm. The function allows school officials to intervene when a student is struggling and offer counseling or alert parents, a situation that’s played out at least four times at Yeh’s school in as many years.

GoGuardian told NPR 2,000 school districts use the company’s software, and it’s helped dozens of suicidal students.

Rodney Griffin, who coordinates the student computer program for Missouri’s Neosho School District, said he receives a notice about students’ search history about once per semester.

“Any time, day and night, I alert a school counselor or administrators,” he said. “I’ve had it happen when they contacted home at like 10 p.m. and said, ‘I think you need to check on your child.’”

Student privacy experts, however, are speaking out about schools eavesdropping on students over concerns about how the information is used, and how easily it could snowball into more intrusive surveillance.

“This is a growing trend where schools are monitoring students more and more for safety reasons,” Elana Zeide, a student privacy expert at NYU’s Information Law Institute, told NPR. “I think student safety and saving lives is obviously important, and I don’t want to discount that. But I also think there’s a real possibility that this well-meaning attempt to protect students from themselves will result in overreach.”

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Zeide pointed out that students who search suicide-related information for school projects, for example, would run the risk of “sending immediate alerts to the powers that be.” Students who do not have a computer at home could also be subjected to more scrutiny than their more affluent peers, she said.

“Are we conditioning children to accept constant monitoring as the normal state of affairs in everyday life?” Zeide questioned.

American School Counselor Association ethics chairwoman Carolyn Stone raised similar concerns about the “intrusive” suicide tracking.

“On the surface, it sounds like a very good idea to err on the side of caution when it comes to student suicide,” she told NPR. “But this is something that sounds like it could spin out of control. … It’s a slippery slope.”