Earlier this month, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) launched a “Spying on Students” campaign to convince parents that school-supplied electronic devices and software present significant privacy risks for their children. This campaign highlights a phenomenon known as the privacy panic cycle, where advocacy groups make increasingly alarmist claims about the privacy implications of a new technology, until these fears spread through the news media to policymakers and the public, causing a panic before cooler heads prevail, and people eventually come to understand and appreciate innovative new products and services.

When it comes to privacy, EFF has a history of such histrionics. The organization has accused desktop printers of violating human rights, spread misinformation about the effectiveness of CCTV cameras, escalated confrontations around the purported abuse of RFID, cried foul over online behavioral advertising, and much more. These claims, even if overblown and ultimately disproved by experience, generate headlines and allow EFF to spread fear, ploughing the ground for harmful regulation or even technology bans.

EFF’s newly launched “Spying on Students” campaign is yet another example of this tendency to put fear ahead of fact. EFF