Gaggle.Net

Gaggle.Net, Inc. is an education technology company selling safety and monitoring services to K-12 school districts. Jeff Patterson founded it in 1998 as a secure student email provider and remains founder and chief executive.

Origin

Patterson’s own account of the company’s beginning, published on its site, is: “I wanted to bring the power of digital communication to schools while giving teachers an easy way to watch over their gaggle of students. My vision of student-centric schools using cutting-edge technology to safely inspire creativity and ingenuity remains the driving force in Gaggle’s ongoing story.”

The company states that it is “the pioneer in helping K-12 districts manage student safety on school-provided technology” and has “helped hundreds of districts avoid tragedies and save lives.”

Stated mission and products

Gaggle states its mission as “to ensure the safety and well-being of students and schools by leveraging people and technology,” with a vision “that all schools are safe and all students get the mental and emotional help they need.” Its current product list is Safety Management, Therapy, Web Filter, ReachOut, After Hours Support, Safety Tipline, Archive and Professional Development, and it describes its model as combining technology with “24/7/365 U.S.-based human support.”

Relevance to digital political discourse

Gaggle is one of the clearest instances in this collection of surveillance infrastructure adopted through procurement rather than legislation: a district signs a contract, and machine learning then flags content in students’ school-issued accounts — including email message text and subject lines and items shared from Google Drive — for review by Gaggle staff, with harmful content blocked. The decision to monitor is therefore made in a purchasing process rather than a public policy debate. Gaggle publishes an AI Ethics page covering the automated part of that process.