e-HallPass, a digital system that students have to use to request to leave their classroom and which takes note of how long they've been away, including to visit the bathroom, has spread into at least a thousand schools around the United States.

The system has some resemblance to the sort of worker monitoring carried out by Amazon, which tracks how long its staff go to the toilet for, and is used to penalize workers for "time off task." It also highlights how automated tools have led to increased surveillance of students in schools, and employees in places of work.

"This product is just the latest in a growing number of student surveillance tools—designed to allow school administrators to monitor and control student behavior at scale, on and off campus," Doug Levin, co-founder and national director for the K12 Security Information eXchange, a non-profit focused on cybersecurity for schools, told Motherboard.