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Student Online Information Privacy

September 20, 2014 by Admin Admin

By Janet Pinto, Chief Academic Officer, Curriki

Student privacy is a growing issue, as more and more data is being gathered on K-12 students. The intent of thIs data acquisition is generally worthwhile. The primary purpose is to obtain more knowledge about student achievement and learning styles, and to support individualized instruction. The goal is to allow students to learn at their own pace.

There are, however, potential risks, since such data is being held in databases distributed on computers owned by school districts, or by state governments, or increasingly, by private companies and organizations. In some cases this data is being loaded into cloud computing resources owned by third parties.

The California state legislature has proposed the most comprehensive law ever to safeguard student information. The proposed law, titled the “Student Online Personal Information Protection Act”, awaits Governor Jerry Brown’s signature. The bill “requires operators of K-12 online sites, services, and applications to keep student personal information private. Under the bill, online operators can only use student personal information for school purposes; including adaptive and personalized student learning. The bill prohibits operators of K-12 online sites, services, and applications from selling student personal information to third parties, like advertisers.” (This quotation is from SOPIPA Fact Sheet available at:

http://sd06.senate.ca.gov/sites/sd06.senate.ca.gov/files/SB1177_SOPIPA_FACT-SHEET.pdf)

“It’s a landmark bill in that it’s the first of its kind in the country to put the onus on Internet companies to do the right thing,” said Senator Darrell Steinberg, the California state senator who wrote the bill.

“Legislators in the state passed a law last month prohibiting educational sites, apps and cloud services used by schools from selling or disclosing personal information about students from kindergarten through high school; from using the children’s data to market to them; and from compiling dossiers on them. The law is a response to growing parental concern that sensitive information about children — like data about learning disabilities, disciplinary problems or family trauma — might be disseminated and disclosed, potentially hampering college or career prospects. Although other states have enacted limited restrictions on such data, California’s law is the most wide-ranging.” – NY Times blog of September 15th

A majority of states in the U.S. have implemented, or are considering, various forms of student privacy legislation to prevent disclosure and commercial use of student data outside of the school context. The federal legislation currently on the books is now four decades old, and not suited to the modern era of mobile devices, social media, cloud computing, and Big Data (massive databases).

Here is Curriki’s privacy policy with respect to young children:

OUR COMMITMENT TO CHILDREN’S PRIVACY

Protecting the privacy of young children is especially important. For that reason, Curriki does not knowingly collect or maintain personally identifiable information on the Curriki Site from persons under 13 years-of-age. If Curriki learns that personally-identifiable information of persons less than 13-years-of-age has been collected on Curriki without verifiable parental consent, then Curriki will take the appropriate steps to delete this information. If you are a parent or guardian and discover that your child under the age of 13 has obtained a Curriki Site account, then you may alert Curriki at Webmaster@curriki.org and request that Curriki delete that child’s personal information from its systems.

And for the benefit of all of our users, Curriki is not in the business of selling your personal information. You can see our entire privacy policy here: http://library.curriki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/PrivacyPolicy

We’d love to hear your comments. Where do you stand on this student privacy issue? How can we implement Big Data technology in schools so as to gain the benefits of better student learning outcomes, but without compromising personal data?

The Threat to Student Data Privacy

July 31, 2014 by Admin Admin

By Janet Pinto, Chief Academic Officer, Curriki

Parent Earl MacEnulty was recently on The Stream on Al Jazeera America (@ajam) talking about the theft of his child’s identity since the age of five. As more and more schools move to online systems and the “cloud” to track everything from a student’s performance to behavioral, financial and health records, the security of students’ personal and academic information is at greater risk.

Of course, there are many concerns. One is that highly sensitive student data is not only used by the school district, but shared with third-parties, including for-profit vendors. Suddenly, students could be seeing pop-up ads saying “Struggling with Algebra? Tutors available…” Or worse, the danger that a student’s identity will be stolen, which is becoming increasingly common. According to the FTC’s Consumer Sentinel Network Data Book, children, 19 and under, made up 6 percent of all identity theft victims in 2012.

According to Diane Ravitch, president of the Network for Public Education, “Since the passage of FERPA in 1974, parents expected that Congress was protecting the confidentiality of information about their children. However, in recent years, the US Department of Education has rewritten the regulations governing FERPA, eviscerating its purpose and allowing outside parties to gain access to data about children that should not be divulged to vendors and other third parties. The Network for Public Education calls on Congress to strengthen FERPA and restore the protection of families’ right to privacy.”

Last week, the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy urged Congress to review and strengthen both FERPA and Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), to roll back the harmful provisions of the 2009 and 2011 FERPA regulations, and to update both laws in light of new and unforeseen threats to privacy rights. You can read more about this in their letter here.

Do you have concerns about student data privacy or do you believe we’re in an online era where “over sharing” is the norm and there is no privacy?

Children’s Educational Data Privacy

August 17, 2013 by Admin Admin

By Kim Jones, CEO, Curriki

Recently there has been a lot of press around the NSA impinging on American citizens’ Internet and telephone privacy, either purposefully or by mistake. Scott McNealy, former CEO of Sun Microsystems, said over a dozen years ago, with the rise of the Internet, that “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.”

Certainly in this age of Facebook, mobile phone tracking, Twitter, and unencrypted email in particular, and of social media, WiFi, big data, the Cloud, viruses and sophisticated hacking tools in general, people are sharing more information about themselves than ever before. Often this is deliberately, and just as frequently, it is inadvertently shared. And this information can be accessed by criminals and others, easier than is generally realized.

(The Cloud in this context just means data being stored on servers outside of an organization’s security firewall. A school district, for example, might be storing data not on their own computer servers, but with a company providing cloud data services. Data is shipped over the Internet from the school district to the cloud service.)

But although we may have less privacy than before, most of us also want to ensure we retain certain key privacy rights, including the right against unreasonable search guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution (for the U.S.), and our right to privacy for personal information such as medical records, social security numbers, credit card numbers and bank account balances. Few people would want such information belonging to them to be made public. In the U.S. HIPAA regulations protect the privacy of medical information, for example.

What about children’s data at school? Typically this data has been held at the school district level. Now children’s test scores are being stored in the Cloud. But not just test scores, also other data about kids relating to their school life is being stored in cloud databases as well. One benefit of placing data in the Cloud is to have possible access to a student’s profile as he or she moves between school districts.

The article linked below reports on inBloom, a nonprofit organization that seeks to provide Big Data analysis services for student test scores, in support of an effort to customize learning to individual students and thereby improve outcomes:

http://money.cnn.com/2013/06/28/technology/innovation/inbloom/index.html?hpt=hp_t3

“Non-profit inBloom offers an Internet database service that allows schools to store, track and analyze data on schoolchildren. If you think about it, that information is more than just test scores. It’s whether kids receive free lunch — a telling indicator of the family’s finances. It’s the time a student got into a fight in the schoolyard. And it could be a child’s prescription medication.”

Some parents are concerned, especially since school districts may agree to share information with other districts. “This information … I have no idea what it is, I have no idea who’s using it, I have no idea for what purpose,” said one parent in New York City. Parents in her school district are concerned that they were not given notification before their children’s data began to be loaded into inBloom’s database.

What do you think? How would you feel about your child’s data being loaded into the Cloud, and accumulated over their 12 or 13-year school history? The same data is probably already on your school district’s computers. Does the potential of enhancing personalized learning outweigh the privacy concerns? Please share your thoughts on this issue.

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