From: New York Times
A leading children’s advocacy group is challenging the educational technology software industry, an estimated $8 billion market, to develop national safeguards for the personal data collected about students from kindergarten through high school.
“We believe in the power of education technology, used wisely, to transform learning,” said James P. Steyer, the chief executive of the group. “But students should not have to surrender their privacy at the schoolhouse door.”
Tim Drinan, a Google spokesman, said that advertising was turned off by default in Google Apps for Education products like document-sharing and that the system did not scan students’ e-mails for advertising purposes. He declined to comment specifically on the group’s letter.
School districts across the country are increasingly adopting digital technologies that collect details about students’ achievements, activities, absences, disabilities and learning styles in an effort to tailor instruction to the individual child. The hope is that personalized, data-driven education will ultimately improve students’ graduation rates and career prospects.
Many school districts, however, are using student assessment software and other services without placing sufficient restrictions on the use of children’s personal details by companies, experts in education privacy law say. Parents may not be aware of the security and privacy risks to their children, these experts say, because schools are not required to notify parents or obtain their consent before sharing student’s details with vendors who perform institutional functions.
New research on how school districts handle the transfer of student data to companies, for instance, has found that administrators have signed contracts without clauses to protect personal details like children’s contact information, age ranges or where they wait for school buses every morning. Researchers at Fordham University School of Law in New York are reporting, for example, that certain school districts’ contracts for cafeteria service payment features on student ID cards would allow companies to collect, store, share and sell information on everything a student buys and eats at school. That could have implications for students’ families.
It would be great if the personal file and personal data of schoolchildren remained confidential. I am sure that technology is now so advanced that it is easy to do. Because most likely the academic works of schoolchildren have become public and essay writers uk duplicate them and resell them. As a result, students receive a low score for so-called plagiarism.