A single 2025 cyberattack on an EdTech company exposed student data across 80 Canadian districts and into the U.S.—a case UNICEF Innocenti says reflects a broader pattern, not an anomaly.

Their new global data governance report confirms what systems have long signaled: tools are optimized for adoption, not learning—and the greatest risks fall on the most vulnerable students.

This UNBOUND piece reads the findings through a Digital Stewardship lens—what policy is finally naming, and what practitioners still need to do.

If AI were built as a public good —transparent, governed, and accessible—an entirely new class of educational problems would become solvable. Most importantly, we could finally address a challenge that has undermined learning for decades: how to keep education functioning when systems around it fail.