The Parent Coalition for Student Privacy urges you to write a letter on behalf of your child or everyone’s children to the Federal Trade Commission. The deadline is November 21.
Right now, the Federal Trade Commission is collecting comments from the public about how their oversight of the use of personal data by commercial enterprises can be improved. As you know, many parents are rightly concerned that too many vendors that collect personal student data at the behest of schools and districts have recklessly allowed that data to breach, and/or have used it for advertising, sale, or other commercial purposes. The comment period to the FTC has been extended through this Monday, Nov. 21, 2022, and we encourage all parents to submit comments by the end of that day.
Since the pandemic, the risky use of digital programs and apps in schools has soared. Most of these programs are operated and owned by for-profit companies who have been collecting personal student data without parental consent, sufficient oversight, restrictions, and/or security protections. As a result, the number of student data breaches has exploded.
This is in part because the existing data security provisions in federal law are weak or non-existent. The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA, only requires “reasonable” security without the FTC having defined that term, while FERPA does not specify any security standards at all. And too many vendors are using personal data to target ads to students or their families, and/or to build new programs and services around, which are clearly commercial and not educational purposes.
We encourage you to submit your comments here; no later than this Monday at 11:59 pm. Let the FTC know that they should use all their authority to ensure that student data is safe and secure and used ONLY for educational purposes. A sample email is below, but please edit it any way you like. MOST important is for you to add any examples of when your children’s data was breached or improperly used. Please also share any such experiences with us, to aid us in our work going forward, by emailing us atinfo@studentprivacymatters.org
A sample email message is below. Thanks!
______
To the FTC:
I am a parent and am very concerned about how the number of student data breaches has skyrocketed in recent years, through hacking, ransomware, and other cybersecurity events. Moreover, too often school vendors are also using and abusing student data for commercial uses. I urge you to require enforceable contracts that require encryption, as well as other strong security standards for the collection, disclosure, and use of student data. Also, these contracts must prohibit vendors from accessing or using any data they do not need for the purposes of carrying out their contracted services, and the information they do collect should be deleted as soon as possible, preferably at the conclusion of each school year or at the very least, when students graduate or leave the district.
I also urge you to strongly prohibit the use of student data for any commercial purpose, including allowing vendors to sell it, to use it to target ads, and/or to use it to develop new products or services.
Yours sincerely [ add your name here].
—
And have a great Thanksgiving!
Leonie Haimson & Cassie Creswell, co-chairs
Parent Coalition for Student Privacy
124 Waverly Pl.
New York, NY 10011
info@studentprivacymatters.org
www.studentprivacymatters.org
Follow @parents4privacy
Subscribe to Parent Coalition for Student Privacy newsletter at https://www.studentprivacymatters.org/join-us
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I shared the petition on social media. Online privacy in this country is a joke. There is no privacy when Big Tech has a hand in crafting legislation. Students in the EU have much better privacy rights than those in the US.
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Since the ransom attack on LAUSD, I get about 50 targeted ads a day through Microsoft. My students are forced by the school to give personal data to Renaissance K-12 Software which claims, “More than 2.8 billion real-world data points about student learning drive product development;” College Board; Microsoft; Google; Schoology; and who knows how many others. All students log into most of the aforementioned with the same password. Think about how dumb that is. That’s not even taking into account how warped instruction has become to focus on software instead of solid teaching methods. The students are being harmed in more ways than one.
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Much of this comes from the school system itself. 3rd party vendors get status as “school staff” so they then have the right to private student data under federal law. School administration makes most of these decisions and put student data at risk.
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New York State put its Ed Law 2D student data privacy regs into full effect right in the midst of us going back into pandemic classrooms in September 2020. Let’s just say it threw teachers and students some HUGE curveballs, as noble as the digital privacy effort may be.
Longtime websites we used were now questionable. The online college course resource (essentially our textbook) used by my high school students taking a co-credit class was suddenly an issue. All at a moment in history when the internet was more important than ever in school.
Imagine lifelines being cut, pell-mell. It was like a digital airplane plunging into the ground …that’s the feeling I had on some mornings.
So, I hope real life people working in actual schools are making their concerns known about how these sorts of well-meaning laws are implemented..
It’s one more reason why I retired back in June. I couldn’t keep up with the computers, with the machine in which I was a cog. And, I’m not some slacker. I worked relentlessly on behalf of my students.
Meanwhile…yeah, good luck to all of us trying to find online privacy these days.
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