Digital hall pass app SmartPass tracks when, where, and how long students leave class, generating a civil liberties backlash
SmartPass: When the Hall Pass Becomes a Data Collection Tool
More than 150 New York City public schools are now using a digital hall pass system called SmartPass, and students are not happy about it. The app, which tracks when students leave class, where they are going, and how long they are absent, was marketed to administrators as a safety and accountability tool. Students are calling it something else: surveillance.
How SmartPass Works
SmartPass, developed by Raptor Technologies following an acquisition in December 2024, allows teachers to monitor student movement in real time through a dashboard that shows which students have active passes, how long they have been out, and where they are supposed to be going. The system includes a feature called Encounter Prevention that blocks specific students from being in the hallway or bathrooms at the same time, designed to prevent vaping, vandalism, and what the company calls bathroom meetups. Administrators can set pass time limits, cap the number of passes per student per day, and receive alerts when students deviate from expected patterns.
Students Push Back
At a Brooklyn high school, senior Shokhjakhon Samiev, a member of the New York Civil Liberties Union’s Teen Activist Project, described the system as taking micromanagement of students to a whole new level. He pointed out that schools are spending thousands of dollars on the system — money that could go toward teachers or better facilities — and that parents were not given the option to opt out. He also identified a practical flaw: students have been able to sign out under classmates’ names, creating errors in the data the system is supposed to make reliable. At another school, students hung posters reading Big Brother is Watching: Abolish SmartPass, invoking Orwellian surveillance as the frame for their objection.
The Safety Case for the Technology
School administrators argue the benefits are real. An assistant principal at a large NYC school cited the ability to prevent incidents between students who should not be near each other at the same time as one of the most valuable features. Raptor Technologies, the company behind SmartPass, argues on its platform that digital hall pass tracking improves safety, reduces lost instructional time, and gives administrators actionable data to support students who are chronically missing class. During emergencies, the system can show which students are in the hallways in real time, a genuine safety benefit that is difficult to dismiss.
The Privacy Question
The deployment of SmartPass sits within a much larger debate about student surveillance in public schools. Since the COVID-era explosion of ed-tech tools — many of which were adopted without meaningful parental input or privacy review — schools have accumulated data on students at a scale that would have seemed extraordinary a decade ago. The NYCLU’s youth and schools program has documented the risks of data collection systems that normalize surveillance of minors, arguing that the cumulative effect is a generation of students conditioned to accept institutional monitoring as a baseline condition of public life.
What Happens to the Data
SmartPass collects detailed records of student movement over the course of a school year. That data includes patterns that could be used to identify students with medical conditions, anxiety, or social conflicts. Who has access to it, how long it is retained, and under what circumstances it could be shared with law enforcement or other government agencies are questions the DOE has not fully answered publicly. Until they are, the civil liberties concerns raised by students like Samiev deserve to be taken seriously by every parent in the city.
