[LINK] Student Data being sold to advertisers: US

[Jan Whitaker]

[we sort of warned about this when universities in Australia hooked 
up with Google as an email provider. Now Microsoft is doing the same 
through outlook.com accounts (melbourne PC user group is moving to 
that one; I've decided to give it up as a result). I wonder if 
schools in Australia are following suit and if there has been any 
analysis as to the legality.]


Immense Unease Over Advertisers Nabbing Student Data: Poll

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/22/student-data-privacy-poll_n_4640688.html
Posted: 01/22/2014 12:01 am EST  |  Updated: 01/22/2014 12:59 am EST

As technology continues to seep into U.S. classrooms, an overwhelming 
number of parents and others worry that children's private 
information may not be secure.

A whopping 89 percent of Americans reported they are "very" or 
"somewhat" concerned about "advertisers using personal data about 
children to market to them," according to a nationally representative 
survey conducted by the Benenson Strategy Group on behalf of Common 
Sense Media, an advocacy group for children and families. The survey 
asked questions of 800 registered voters, including 227 parents, by 
phone earlier this month, and has a 3.5 percent margin of error.

The poll found that while only 37 percent of the public has "seen, 
read, or heard" "some" or "a great deal" about schools collecting, 
storing and sharing information, including age, weight and grades, 90 
percent are "somewhat" or "very" concerned about private companies 
having access to student data.

"Student privacy and the protection of data is about to explode as an 
issue in the United States," said James Steyer, who heads Common 
Sense Media. "The numbers are off the charts. It's clear that 
students' personal and private information must not be for sale. Period."

Over the last few years, "data-driven instruction" has become a 
buzzword in education, with the idea behind it included in the 
pitches of education technology vendors and the federal government's 
Race to the Top -- District competition, in 
which<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/22/race-to-the-top-2012-school-districts_n_1534517.html> 
school districts vie for cash in part by tailoring education plans to 
individual students (the Department used the phrase "personalized 
learning"). Proponents see technology that uses data collection as 
key to showing teachers which skills students are missing and what 
motivates learning. School districts are increasingly using cloud 
computing to store thousands of digital records for each student.

Because the field is new, it's largely unregulated.

Ninety-five percent of school districts in the U.S. rely on cloud 
computing, storing data on remote servers connected to the Internet, 
according to 
<http://law.fordham.edu/center-on-law-and-information-policy/30198.htm>recent 
report from the Fordham University School of Law. The Fordham paper 
found that only one-fourth of districts tell parents about these 
services and one-fifth of districts don't have policies explicitly 
governing their use. Many contracts between districts and technology 
vendors don't have privacy policies, and less than 7 percent of the 
contracts restrict vendors from selling student information. The 
agreements rarely address security, according to the Fordham research.

Even advocates of increasing the use of data to inform education 
acknowledged the survey's implications.

[snip - longer stuff at the link]


Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
jwhit at janwhitaker.com

Sooner or later, I hate to break it to you, you're gonna die, so how 
do you fill in the space between here and there? It's yours. Seize your space.
~Margaret Atwood, writer

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