Archives for category: Privacy and Privacy Rights
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O Brave New World!

By dianeravitch
April 4, 2018 //
9

 

China has brought surveillance of its citizens to new levels, using face recognition technology. 

A woman jaywalked, thinking nothing of it. The police demanded her identity card, but she didn’t have it. They snapped her picture and promptly pulled up her identity and her personal history.

This incident was but a small indicator of China’s determination to monitor its people.

“Mao Yan’s Shenzhen is part of one of the great social experiments of mankind — the use of massive amounts of data, combined with facial recognition technology, shaming and artificial intelligence to control a population via marriage of the state and private companies. Already on the packed highways of Shanghai, honking has decreased. That’s because directional microphones coupled with high-definition cameras can identify and ticket — again, via WeChat — noisy drivers and display their names, photographs and identity card numbers on the city’s many LED boards. On some streets, if drivers stop their cars by the side of the road longer than seven minutes, high-definition cameras identify the driver and, again, issue him or her an instant ticket…

”But as Mao Yan’s story makes clear, this technology is bleeding into the rest of China, where 95 percent of the population is Han Chinese. And China’s authorities won’t be content with traffic stops. Their goal is behavioral modification on a massive scale. Chinese planners have announced their intention to tap the vast AI and surveillance infrastructure currently under construction to generate “social credit” scores for all of China’s 1.5 billion people. With a high score, traveling, securing a loan, buying a car and other benefits will be easy to come by. Run afoul of the authorities, and problems begin.
Some Chinese businessmen who are benefiting from this massive investment in data have argued that the Chinese are less concerned about privacy than people in the United States. Robin Li, the founder of Baidu, China’s version of Google, which routinely shares its data with the Chinese Communist Party, argued over the weekend that Chinese people don’t care that much about privacy. “The Chinese people are more open or less sensitive about the privacy issue,” said Li, speaking at the China Development Forum in Beijing. “If they are able to trade privacy for convenience, safety and efficiency, in a lot of cases, they are willing to do that.” Ironically, Li’s remarks were released by the Chinese magazine Caixin on the same day that Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg issued an apology for releasing user data to a political consultancy.
In her article, Mao Yan didn’t seem to agree with Li’s optimistic interpretation of the campaign. “Maybe,” she wrote, “it’s intimidation to make everyone afraid.” I think she’s right. Hours after Mao Yan posted her story on China’s Internet, censors took it down.”

We should never normalize the invasion of privacy.

Thats why I left Facebook. So did Elon Musk.

The protection of privacy—some basic human dignity—should concern us all.

Categories Privacy and Privacy Rights, Technology

National Education Policy Center Is Leaving Facebook

By dianeravitch
March 27, 2018 //
35

I deactivated my two Facebook accounts last week. I am not alone.

This happened today:

Key Takeaway: Facebook’s benefits are overwhelmed by problems inherent in its business model, its failure to safeguard personal information, and its lack of transparency and accountability.

Find Documents:
Press Release: http://nepc.info/node/9115

Contact:
Kevin Welner: (303) 492-8370, kevin.welner@colorado.edu
Alex Molnar: (480) 797-7261, nepc.molnar@gmail.com

Learn More:
NEPC Resources on School Commercialism

BOULDER, CO (March 27, 2018) – The National Education Policy Center (NEPC) will delete its Facebook account on Wednesday March 28. We have already removed social sharing via Facebook from the NEPC website and our other communication tools.

While Facebook has many benefits, we feel compelled to disassociate ourselves from the invasive data mining and the third-party targeting of users inherent in its business model. The goal of the NEPC is to provide high-quality information in support of democratic deliberation. Deceitful micro-targeted propaganda is made possible by Facebook data and undermines democracy. Our reading of the evidence and record tells us that neither Facebook nor any other opaque, unregulated, and unaccountable private entity should have control over the private data of billions of people. Whatever services are provided by the Facebook platform are overwhelmed by Facebook’s business model, its lack of transparency, its failure to safeguard the personal information of its users, and its lack of accountability.

NEPC annual reports on Schoolhouse Commercialism have highlighted the intensifying surveillance culture and other dangers to student privacy in the digital age, and Facebook has emerged as a primary culprit. It would be disingenuous for us to use Facebook to promote those reports and other NEPC work.

We don’t pretend that this was an easy step. Communication of research lies at the heart of NEPC’s mission, and social media are a big part of communications—with Facebook positioned as a dominant social media platform. Last month, NEPC’s “Schools of Opportunity” project benefited hugely from a short video that went viral on Facebook, garnering over a million views.

Yet the more we learned about Facebook’s data gathering , and in particular the Cambridge Analytica scandal , the more we couldn’t avoid the conclusion that Facebook’s benefits are far outweighed by its dangers. Facebook is designed in ways that are inherently troubling. As Facebook’s first president warned, “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains .” He disclosed that Facebook was designed to create a “social validation feedback loop” that we now know does indeed alter brain chemistry by triggering dopamine hits each time a posting is liked. And marketers are taking full advantage .

Consider also this passage from a recent article in The Guardian (internal links included):

That Silicon Valley parents use the money they earn from tech to send their children to tech-free schools is no secret. But such qualms have not stopped the tech companies themselves from continuing to push their products on to other people’s children, both through partnerships with school districts and special apps for children as young as six.

In January 2018, the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood sent Mark Zuckerberg a letter , signed by over 100 child advocates, educators, and experts in child development, requesting that Facebook discontinue its Messenger Kids app for children. A growing body of research demonstrates that excessive use of digital devices and social media is harmful to children and teens, making it likely that this new app—designed to encourage greater use of digital devices and social media among children—will undermine children’s healthy development. Facebook continues to promote Messenger Kids.

This problem is much larger than Facebook, but we cannot use that fact to justify inaction. We cannot, in good conscience, continue to lend tacit support to Facebook. NEPC has concluded that encouraging our readers to provide information that will be used by Facebook and its clients to tailor and limit information to which our readers will then be exposed contradicts our defined organizational mission, which is to support democratic deliberation about education policy.

We at NEPC encourage other education organizations to consider whether they too should delete their Facebook accounts, and we call upon policy makers to develop policies that provide strict public oversight of social media platforms.

Schools and Digital Platforms

NEPC’s own publications describe how digital platforms work through schools to pull children into the surveillance economy—an unregulated economy that these platforms have worked to construct and from which they benefit financially. “Students are offered no choice,” explains Faith Boninger, co-author with Alex Molnar of NEPC’s commercialism reports. As one student told Boninger and Molnar, “I can’t delete my Facebook account. My school activities have Facebook groups that I have to access. Maybe I can delete my account when I graduate.”

Molnar, who is NEPC’s Publications Director, warns that “students are tied to Facebook by their school-related activities, and they unwillingly and usually unwittingly provide Facebook with information that is used to limit what they are exposed to on-line and funnel them to worldviews that will reward Facebook’s clients.”

Boninger and Molnar add that their research has shown that digital platforms being promoted for school use are neither well understood by educators nor adequately regulated by existing policy and law. Says Molnar, “the kind of abuses inherent in Facebook’s business model, management structure, and lack of transparency are, without question, also occurring in schools and classrooms every day via social networks and digital platforms.”

Learn more about NEPC research on digital marketing and data gathering in schools at http://nepc.colorado.edu/ceru-home.

The following organizations also have resources on data gathering from children and in schools: Campaign for Commercial-Free Childhood , Center for Digital Democracy , Electronic Frontier Foundation , Electronic Privacy Information Center , and the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy .

We encourage people to distribute this announcement as widely as possible and to continue to share the work of the National Education Policy Center with others.

 

 

 

 

Categories National Education Policy Center, Privacy and Privacy Rights

The New Yorker: China Is Developing a Social Credit Rating for All Its Citizens.

By dianeravitch
March 21, 2018 //
16

 

Jiayang Fan, a staff writer at the New Yorker, describes China’s plan to develop a social credit rating for every one of its citizens.

When she was a child in school in China, children earned red stars for behavior and accomplishment, which were publicly displayed. Now the State proposes a similar though far more complex rating system. The State

”aims to compile a comprehensive national database out of citizens’ fiscal, government, and possibly personal information. First publicized, last year, in a planning document published by the State Council, S.C.S. was billed as “an important component part of the Socialist market-economy system,” underwriting a “harmonious Socialist society.” Its intended goals are “establishing the idea of a sincerity culture, and carrying forward sincerity and traditional virtues,” and its primary objectives are to raise “the honest mentality and credit levels of the entire society” as well as “the over-all competitiveness of the country,” and “stimulating the development of society and the progress of civilization….

“According to the planning document, S.C.S. will be used “to encourage keeping trust and punish breaking trust.” Doctors, teachers, construction firms, scientists, sports figures, N.G.O.s, members of the judicial system, and government administrators will face special scrutiny. It is conceivable that the data generated through smartphones, apps, and online transactions will be marshalled in the service of this overarching and uncomfortably broad aim. More unsettlingly, the algorithm used to calculate the score of an individual or organization might be withheld by the government from the individual herself….

“The opacity of its infrastructure is disquieting. What safeguards will be put in place to prevent the database from being rigged? Will the very corruption that the social-credit system is meant to counter infect the system itself? Who will oversee the overseers of the operation? How will privacy, long under siege in contemporary China, be protected? And will punishment for political discontent be delivered through dismal credit scores? If S.C.S. becomes a mechanism of financial and social integration, it is hard to imagine how it could avoid becoming an instrument of mass surveillance.”

 

Categories Accountability, International, Privacy and Privacy Rights

Leonie Haimson Visits a Summit Charter School, Funded by the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative

By dianeravitch
December 7, 2017 //
11

A few days ago, I posted an article by Kristina Rizga about Summit charter schools and their online lessons. On the whole, it seemed to me, the article was admiring.

Leonie Haimson has a different view of Summit.

Haimson has played a leading role in the movement to stop data mining of students and to protect student privacy. After writing a column in The Answer Sheet Blog expressing her concerns about the Summit charter schools and their online platform, Haimson was contacted by the founder of Summit and invited to visit one of their schools.

Haimson writes here about her experience when she visited the flagship Summit Charter School in Redwood City, California.

“Summit charter schools and their online platform, now used in over 300 schools across the country, both public and charter, have received millions of dollars from Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg; Zuckerberg has pledged to support the continued expansion of the online platform through his LLC, the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative.

“Shortly after my Washington Post piece appeared, I was contacted by Diane Tavenner, the CEO of Summit charter schools, who asked if we could meet when she was visiting NYC. I agreed. We had lunch on Sept. 15, and I handed her a list of questions, mostly about Summit’s privacy policy, most of which my associate, Rachael Stickland, had already sent to Summit staff that she had met at SXSW Edu the previous March, and to which she’d never received a response….

“During the lunch, I mentioned that I was going to be in Oakland the weekend of Oct. 14- 15 for the Network for Public Education conference, and that I would be interested in visiting some schools after that are using the Summit platform. I said I was especially eager to visit public schools, since I’d heard from many public school parents in five states who told me their children had negative experiences with the program. These parents were upset that Summit had withdrawn the right of parents to consent to the system shortly after CZI took over, and they were concerned about how their children’s personal data was being shared with Summit and then redisclosed with unspecified other third “partners” for unclear purposes.

“Diane later emailed me and said that I could visit Summit Prep charter school on Oct. 16, in Redwood City, their flagship school. An Uber would come and pick me up at my Oakland hotel, she said, and the drive would take about an hour each way…

“At Summit Prep, I was met by two school leaders, and we talked in an empty office for about a half hour, where they explained to me about the platform and how it was designed. Then we briefly toured two classrooms. In the first classroom, there were about thirty students engaged in “Personalized Learning Time”, gazing at computer screens and working on their individual “playlists.” These playlists include content in different “focus areas” delivered via various mediums, including online texts and videos. When students have learned these materials, they’re supposed to take multiple choice online tests to show they’ve “mastered” the area. In addition, in each of their courses, there are projects they are supposed to complete…

“I visited another classroom where 12th graders were engaged in peer-reviewing essays they had written at the beginning of the class, grading them according to the Summit’s complex rubric of cognitive skills. When I asked why the essays were written on paper rather than on computers, the school leaders told me that this was because they were practicing for the California state exam in which students are asked to write essays on paper.

“I noted that I had seen no classroom or small group discussions. The Summit leaders said that was because none were occurring during my brief visit. It is true that the amount of time I spent in classrooms wasn’t sufficient to make an informed judgment either way, but what I saw did not encourage me.

“When we returned to the office, I questioned why delivering content primarily online was an effective method of teaching. Shouldn’t learning happen in a more interactive fashion, with the material presented in person and then discussed, debated, and explored? Why did they have this comparatively flat, one-dimensional attitude towards content? And how could math be taught this way, given that math requires helping students learn how to solve problems in a more interactive fashion?

“They told me math is taught differently, and indeed had to be taught through teacher-student interaction, but that this isn’t true of any of the other subjects, whether it be English, social sciences or physical sciences.”

Leonie reviewed the many complaints that she has heard from parents at Summit charter schools, especially regarding privacy of student data and long hours in front of a computer.

She writes,

“Yet the juggernaut that is Summit will be difficult to stop. The Silicon Valley Community Foundation gave $20 million to Summit in 2016. The Gates Foundation awarded Summit $10 million in June 2017, “to support implementation of the Summit Learning program in targeted geographies.” In September, the day before I met with Diane Tavenner, Summit was one of the ten winners of the XQ Super High School prize, receiving another $10 million from Laurene Powell Jobs’ LLC, the Emerson Collective, to create a new high school in Oakland.”

Besides, Betsy DeVos loves Summit.

Categories Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, Charter Schools, Education Reform, Privacy and Privacy Rights, Students, Technology

“The Data Monster Ate My Baby”

By dianeravitch
November 22, 2017 //
12

Blogger Victoria Young warns about the voracious appetite of the Data Monster.

It is coming for your children.

She writes:

“Will we one-day look back and wonder why we let Big Data devour our children’s lives in bits and bytes?
Will we scratch our heads in confusion over why we let data become a major driver in so many aspects of our lives?

“Surely we can see that the tech giants are profiting while the greater society suffers? Maybe not.

“But we do know that Americans care about their own right to privacy.

The issue of who is gathering information and what information is being gathered is considered to be an important dimension of privacy control by nearly all American adults.” Pew Research Center (Views About Data Collection and Security)

“But I wonder, why don’t Americans care about protecting children from the BIG DATA Monster?

“When the biggest concern directing the nation is the workforce/military supply-chain for the global economy, it makes perfect sense to allow the tech industry to have access to all education, health, employment, and income records. And what could go wrong with that?”

Read it all.

“Will we one-day look back and wonder why we let Big Data devour our children’s lives in bits and bytes?
Will we scratch our heads in confusion over why we let data become a major driver in so many aspects of our lives?

Surely we can see that the tech giants are profiting while the greater society suffers? Maybe not.

But we do know that Americans care about their own right to privacy.

“The issue of who is gathering information and what information is being gathered is considered to be an important dimension of privacy control by nearly all American adults.” Pew Research Center (Views About Data Collection and Security)

“But I wonder, why don’t Americans care about protecting children from the BIG DATA Monster?

“When the biggest concern directing the nation is the workforce/military supply-chain for the global economy, it makes perfect sense to allow the tech industry to have access to all education, health, employment, and income records. And what could go wrong with that?”

She says contact your legislator by 11/15, but I didn’t get this in time for that deadline. Contact them now.

Categories Data, Data and Data Mining, Education Reform, Privacy and Privacy Rights

Contact Your Senators and Member of Congress! Protect Student Privacy!

By dianeravitch
November 1, 2017 //
5


November 1, 2017

Contact: Rachael Stickland, rachael@studentprivacymatters.org, 303-204-1272

The Parent Coalition for Student Privacy opposes the College Transparency Act and overturning the federal ban on a student unit record system

The Parent Coalition for Student Privacy urges sponsors and supporters of the H.R. 2434 – College Transparency Act (CTA) to reconsider their support for this bill which would require the non-consensual collection by the federal government of the personally identifiable information of every student attending a post-secondary institution. Our members, made up of parents and privacy advocates from throughout the country, believe strongly that the 2008 Higher Education Act’s ban on the creation of a federal unit-record system should not be overturned by the CTA, and that any attempt to authorize a national student database would create an unacceptable and unaccountable surveillance system that would place our citizens at risk.

In recent months it has become clear that data held by post-secondary institutions and government agencies are under increased threat of breaches and cyberattacks. Even our “best protected” national data has been breached, including the hacking in recent years of the National Security Agency (NSA), Department of Defense (DoD), the Office of Personnel and Management (OPM), and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Specifically, the U.S. Department of Education was found to have weaknesses in four out of five security categories according to a 2015 security audit by the Inspector General’s Office.

Said Rachael Stickland, co-chair of the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy: “It’s inconceivable that Congress should entertain legislation that would increase federal collection of personal student data at a time when they have demonstrably proven they are unable to protect what data they already hold.”

Moreover, individual student data held at the federal level could be used in the future as a go-to repository of information for purposes beyond their originally prescribed intent. Even if the CTA specifies permissible uses of the data today, no Congress can limit the actions of future administrations once the data are in the government’s possession. The bill also allows for the expansion and collection of more categories of student data by the Commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) without authorization by Congress. This could easily lead to widespread abuse of personal information for political or ideological gain.

While we agree in principle that students seeking to attend post-secondary institutions should have sufficient information to make informed decisions, it’s possible to do so without the creation of a national student database. New NCES surveys provide previously unavailable statistics on “nontraditional” populations, making passage of the CTA an unnecessary overreach by the federal government at a time when we should minimize data collection rather than expand it.

####

Leonie Haimson
Executive Director
Class Size Matters
124 Waverly Pl.
New York, NY 10011
phone: 212-529-3539
leonie@classsizematters.org
leoniehaimson@gmail.com

Categories Data and Data Mining, Higher Education, Privacy and Privacy Rights

How to Protect Your Child’s Privacy! Join the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy Webinar on Tuesday!

By dianeravitch
September 28, 2017 //
1

A letter from Leonie Haimson, leader of Student Privacy Matters and Class Size Matters (I am a board member).

Dear folks:

This Tuesday October 3 at 8 PM EST, Class Size Matters is co- sponsoring a free webinar with the Parent Coalition and NYS Allies for Public Education on what practical steps parents can take to safeguard their children’s data from breach or abuse.

Our webinar will cover the following topics:

1. How to opt out of directory information sharing — and why;
2. What common practices in schools violate student privacy & federal law;
3. Practical tips for protecting your child’s privacy;
4. Questions to ask your teacher or principal about apps and other technology used in the classroom.

Registration is required so please sign up today!

According to federal law, at the beginning of each year, school districts are supposed to inform parents of their children’s privacy rights under the federal law called FERPA, including their right to opt out at the beginning of the year from allowing the district to disclose their child’s directory information, including name, address and other details, with various organizations or vendors that do NOT provide services to schools.

Yet in NYC and in many other districts, we have discovered that that parents have not been informed of these rights. To make things worse, NYC DOE voluntarily shares the directory information of students with charter schools for recruiting and marketing purposes.

If you are concerned about this issue, and/or have other concerns and questions about how best to safeguard your child’s privacy, please join our webinar. Whether or not you can attend, you should also check out our Parent Toolkit with more information about this issue and much more. More on the directory information issue, including a sample opt out form as a pdf or in word that you can fill out and submit to your school is here.

Hope you can join us on Tuesday and thanks!
Leonie
Leonie Haimson
Executive Director
Class Size Matters
124 Waverly Pl.
New York, NY 10011
212-529-3539

Make a tax-deductible contribution to Class Size Matters now!

Categories Data and Data Mining, Privacy and Privacy Rights

Leonie Haimson: Parents Revolt Against Summit-CZI Plans

By dianeravitch
September 6, 2017 //
35

Leonie Haimson reports here on the parent revolt against the Summit platform, pushed now by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

One of their biggest concerns is data privacy and the lack thereof.

Haimson writes:

Over the course of the 2016-2017 school year, parents throughout the country rebelled against the platform, both because of its lack of privacy but also because they experienced its negative impact on their children’s learning and attitudes to school. In addition, Summit and the schools using the platform are no longer asking for parental consent, probably because so many parents refused or resisted signing the consent forms.

After the Washington Post article appeared, I expanded on the privacy concerns cited in that piece, and pointed out additional issues in my blog. I included a list of questions parents should ask Summit to clarify their data-sharing plans. Parents who sent them to Summit informed me that Summit failed to answer these questions. (I later expanded on these questions, and Rachael Stickland, the co-chair of the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy, submitted them to Summit representatives after personally meeting them at SXSW EDU conference in March. She also received no response.)

Meanwhile, the list of Summit schools, both public and charter, that had allegedly adopted the platform last year was taken down from the Summit website sometime between February 15 and February 18, according to the Wayback Machine – making it even more difficult to ascertain which schools and students are were actually using it. The archived list is here.

On March 3, the Cincinnati Enquirer reported on the experience of parents in Boone County, Kentucky whose schools had adopted the platform– many of whom did not want to consent to their children’s data being shared with so little specificity and so few restrictions:

At the beginning of the school year, parents had to sign a permission slip allowing Summit to access their child’s profile information. Summit uses the info to “conduct surveys and studies, develop new features, products and services and otherwise as requested,” the form states. The agreement also allows Summit to disclose information to third-party service providers and partners “as directed” by schools. That, perhaps, is the biggest source of contention surrounding Summit. … “It’s optional. Nobody has to do Summit, [Deputy Superintendent Karen] Cheser said… Summit spokeswoman declined to speak on the record with The Enquirer.”

Yet within weeks of the publication of this article, at about the same time that the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative took over, someone involved in the Summit initiative decided that parents would no longer be granted the right of consent – either for their children to be subjected to the Summit instructional program or for their data to be shared according to Summit’s open-ended policies. In fact, Summit claimed the right to access, data-mine and redisclose their children’s data in the same way as before – yet now, without asking if parents agreed to these terms.

As she notes, Summit no longer considers it necessary to get parental consent before they collect and use student data.

Categories Education Reform, Privacy and Privacy Rights, Technology

Emily Talmage: Beware the Data Collectors! They are Gathering Information About Your Child

By dianeravitch
August 11, 2017 //
9

Emily Talmage warns that data mining is happening 24/7, whenever children (or adults) go online, at school or at home.

On Monday, the FBI published a public service announcement alerting parents that “smart toys” and entertainment devices for kids may be collecting vast amounts of data about their children.

“The collection of a child’s personal information combined with a toy’s ability to connect to the internet or other devices raises concerns for privacy and physical safety,” the notice warns.

Major news outlets across the country are now sounding the alarm, encouraging parents to research privacy agreements and to find out who has access to their children’s data.

Despite the sudden and urgent concern for children’s privacy, however, the reports have thus far ignored the biggest elephant in the room…

the fact that massive data collection is happening in our schools every single day.

As school districts across the country implement one-to-one digital device initiatives, school testing policies shift to include ongoing “formative” assessments, and data collection expands beyond academics to include highly sensitive psycho-social information, data collection in schools is at an all time high.

Categories Data and Data Mining, Privacy and Privacy Rights

June 30: Join Student Data Deletion Day!

By dianeravitch
June 30, 2017 //
2

Today is the first Student Data Deletion Day.

This is a parent’s response to the obscene amounts of personal data collected about every child. Why do they do it? Because they can, and because you let them.

Please open to see the many links.

As usual, this is an excerpt:

“Our K-12 public schools are collecting an enormous amount of data about our kids that will pre-determine whether their dream schools will give their applications a fair assessment and if prospective employers will give them a chance to interview for an opening.

“The type and amount of data being accumulated and stored by our public schools and third-party vendors is staggering. For example, some elementary schools deploy identification cards with RFID chips that track when and how many times our kids go to the bathroom, how long they spend inside a bathroom stall while taking care of their personal business, and how many times they go to the water fountain along with all of their daily movements in and within the school’s property. Other schools utilize biometric palm readers that scan our kids’ hand or fingerprints to track everything our kids buy in the school cafeteria. All of this cumulative data is a honey pot for colleges, employers, insurance companies, data brokers, cyber criminals, foreign governments, etc…

“Every time our kids may be admonished for talking out of turn or texting in class they may receive a permanent demerit in Class Dojo. In the near future, classrooms may be filled with cameras and other tracking technologies that also analyze our kids every interaction with their teachers and class mates. This is not some type of crazy prediction; in China, this Orwellian future is already a reality.

“Multiple companies in the educational technology space have intentionally misled students, parents, teachers, administrators, and lawmakers about how they are using the personal data they are collecting about our kids in school. For example, Google was caught intentionally scanning student emails for advertising and other troubling purposes despite prior promises it was not. ConnectEDU tried to sell personal student data for profit when it went bankrupt despite promising not to do so. Edmodo, another educational technology company, was recently caught surreptitiously tracking students online to monetize their web surfing habits despite promises to the contrary.

“As a parent and privacy advocate, I have come to the realization that more needs to be done to raise awareness about these issues and to effectuate change. Therefore, I am calling for all K-12 public schools to automatically delete the following data points each and every June 30th after the school year has ended:

-All student Internet browsing history
-All student school work saved on platforms such as the Google G Suite
-All student created emails (and all other digital communications)
-All behavioral data points/saved class interactions (e.g. Class Dojo data points)
-All student physical location data points (e.g. obtained via RFID tags)
-All biometric data collected and tied to a student account (e.g. meal purchase information)
-Etc…
–An Easy To Follow School-Data-Deletion-Request-Template

“This is just the beginning of the conversation and as our schools collect more data points on our kids more data will need to be automatically deleted at the end of each school year. Each public school system and their vendors must be required to certify in writing that the requested data deletion has occurred.

“None of these above data points were kept on the Greatest Generation, Baby Boomers, or Generation X so they are not needed to be collected and saved for future generations. If we really want to make “America Great Again,” kids should be allowed to be kids without the fear that their every move is tied to them for the rest of their lives.

“Some educational technology vendors, industry funded think tanks/associations, and academics (e.g. George Mason University’s Law & Economics Center) may falsely claim deleting this data will harm our children and deprive parents and teachers of the knowledge they need to make more informed choices. Some arguments against automatic data deletion may include: it should be the parents choice, the data is needed for personalization, the information is needed to help improve the service offering so it will help better educate our kids, etc…

“None of these arguments are valid and should not be believed. Parents should not have to opt into protecting their children’s privacy, safety, security, and future. If a parent doesn’t want their child’s data deleted then they have the right to opt out of automatic data deletion.

“Privacy is the corner stone of a free and vibrant democracy. Therefore, we need to start by better protecting our kids in school. The amount of data being collected on our children is staggering and no matter how hard I have advocated for stronger student data privacy laws and for stronger digital privacy laws, I have been out gunned by lobbyists funded by companies that relish an Orwellian society they can easily monetize.

“As a parent, for the sake of our kids and future generations, I ask that you support National Student Data Deletion Day on June 30th by sending in an email or snail mail demanding that your public school system and their vendors start an annual purge of all the unnecessary data points collected about our kids.

“Before our kids email and other school provided digital accounts are set up for the following school year, all prior non-essential data (most of the data is non-essential) should be deleted. Our children should be given a fresh start every school year just like we were when we attended school.

“Data discrimination is real and to help prevent it now is the time to act before its too late! Please HELP OUR KIDS BE KIDS IN THE DIGITAL AGE! — Bradley Shear”

Categories Privacy and Privacy Rights
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