The ubiquity of online communications in the schools opens up new possibilities for entrepreneurs to collect and mine confidential, personally identifiable data about children. Under the terms of a bill to protect student privacy, corporations will not need parental consent to access this data.
“DATA PRIVACY BILL ON THE WAY: The long-awaited student data privacy bill is expected to drop on Monday. Reps. Luke Messer and Jared Polis have been working together to draft it, following principles that President Barack Obama laid out in January [http://politico.pro/1O71PUT]. An aide to Polis said the bill’s language would draw heavily on a voluntary, industry-backed Student Privacy Pledge [http://bit.ly/1zhrSlR ] that has been signed by 124 ed tech companies of all sizes, from startups to giants such as Apple and Google. A bill echoing the pledge would please the ed tech world. But it would likely raise red flags for privacy advocates, who have expressed concerns that the pledge contains too many loopholes to be useful. Among their objections: The pledge doesn’t require companies to get parental consent – or even to give parents advance notice – before collecting intimate information on their children’s academic progress and learning styles. It also explicitly allows companies to build personal profiles of children to help them develop or improve ed-tech products. They can’t sell those profiles, but some parents are uncomfortable with any use of student data for commercial gain. A refresher on the pledge: http://politico.pro/192EYsW”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
There’s nothing like the euphemistic titles of the “reform” movement that are designed to do the opposite of their title. The student privacy bill should be titled the student data mining bill. School “reform” should be more appropriately titled school privatization. You can file these along with the “Recovery and Achievement School Districts” in the trash bin or “refuse container” along with the other euphemisms from the snake oil salesmen.
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I am curious what sort of repercussions there are for teachers who choose to opt out their own children for privacy or other reasons. Can and does it affect their evaluations??
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At least in my state, there are no repercussions. We can’t tell other parents about it, but we can opt out our own kids. Unless we have a child in our school, the administrators don’t even know.
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Nothing like the arrogance in these phrases “build personal profiles of children” in order to help corporations “develop or improve ed-tech products” to stir up some thinking.
“Develop or improve ed-tech products.” Baloney. Obama and the legislators pushing this bill are out of control, They should not ask parents and kids to pay for corporate research and development by giving away their personal privacy and freedom from even more ads shoved at them daily. I do not care whether the corporate give-away of subsidized R&D and marketing flows to Amazon or Google or startups.
This is a corporate “taking” of personal profiles and data AS IF that is a corporate entitlement. That should never become official policy. Talk about corporate welfare.
This is just like the meaningless privacy notices that you get from your bank, or wireless company, or any other corporation. They assume they are “entitled” to use the information they have about you in order to do any marketing they wish…unless you opt out, and you have to do that over and over again, every year.
You have to call or write in order to get OFF the list that is intended to shove more ads at you–ads for ancillary products/services that the main company markets (for a fee) to a zillion “partners.”
Parents need to see through this hype and not let their children and themselves be pawns in legislation carefully contrived to allow for unlimited data-mining and customized marketing of products.
Education should be an ad-free zone, atomatically, no opt-out required.
Doing nothing will guarantee that this appalling and really dangerous legislation goes through.I say this legislation is dangerous for two main reasons.
First, no company can guarantee the security of their information from hackers, or for that matter predators who are employees with a special interest in children and underage teens.
Second, any “we promise to” is likely to be vaporware due to the high rate of churn in tech companies–mergers, buyouts, failures, algorithms that automate many secondary uses of big data.
This legislation creates a hacker’s paradise. It is not friendly to children no matter the hype about improving learning through better products.
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It IS kind of funny though that they floated the “voluntary pledge”with such fanfare and now they have to go back and attempt to write actual regulations.
The whole point of the voluntary pledge was to stop any real regulation.
I wonder if public schools could use the buying power they have to act as regulators/watchdogs since there’s no political will to regulate.
Public schools are in a great position to make demands of the contractor – they’re a giant market. If government won’t regulate they could act without government by not buying until safeguards are in place and enforceable. I suppose it would be more effective if they acted in concert-join with other schools.
They are the buyer and for “ed tech” they are “the market”. They don’t have to accept the demands of the contractor/product developer. That’s backward. The contractor/product developer has to comply with the demands of the school .
I wish they’d use the enormous power they have and simply refuse to buy until their student/parents/teachers needs are met.
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That would be a great idea, except that many states are mandating the high stakes tests. When the state makes a mandate, the district must comply in order to receive state funding. They can’t touch parents, and more parents would be inclined to opt out if they knew their students’ data were being sold to corporations.
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I just wish I had some faith in this process. These industry/government “partnerships” always seem to end up wildly skewed toward the “industry” side. I just fundamentally don’t believe “agnostics” make strong advocates for the public interest.
You have the industry on one side, passionately committed to selling product and then their government “partners” happy to assist them in selling product while adding some “protections” but only those protections the industry says they will accept. There’s an imbalance of commitment and passion there. The “neutral” will always lose in that scenario, and the public interest always DOES seem to lose in these deals.
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