Privacy Bill May Fail Student Data Protection

A bill aimed at safeguarding student privacy fails to secure children's personal information and protects the interests of companies more than kids, privacy advocates say about the congressional legislation introduced Monday.

Private education companies that provide such things as online tutorials and textbooks collect massive amounts of information on students, and fears have mounted in recent years that such information could be used to target advertisements to students or sold outright.

The Student Digital Privacy and Parental Rights Act, introduced in the House on Monday by Reps. Jared Polis, D-Colo., and Luke Messer, R-Ind., aims to counter that risk by boosting digital privacy for students in kindergarten through the 12^th grade. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., is expected to introduce a Senate version.

But a draft of the bill shows gaps through which monitoring and sharing of student data without parental consent could still be allowed, says Khaliah Barnes, director of the student privacy project at the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

For one thing, the bill would not address situations like the one that came to light last week in which ​testing company Pearson was found to be monitoring student social media accounts to screen for attempts to cheat on tests.

The risks to student data privacy extend beyond educational programs. Everyday online services offered by companies like Google state in their privacy policies that user data may be marketed to advertisers and other third parties to help subsidize the free digital programs. The draft bill aims to prohibit companies from using student information for targeting advertising in this way, Barnes says.

Barnes says the bill is “a strong starting point,” but it would also enable loopholes that would allow businesses to change their privacy policies on data-sharing without giving parents a chance to object or request that certain information be deleted.

“Continued use of a service is not meaningful enough to show consent in a program’s privacy protection,” she says of the draft’s loophole.

Polis told The New York Times that he hoped through the bill to increase trust in education technology companies. 

“This is a first step in providing a framework that can address the concerns of parents and educators and, at the same time, allow the promise of education technology to transform our schools,” he said.

The bill would direct the Federal Trade Commission, which has stepped up its online privacy focus, to enforce mismanagement of student data. It follows a proposal made by President Barack Obama in January to restrict tech companies from sending third-party groups and advertisers data collected from school computers about students. Tech companies, including Microsoft, Google and Apple, have also pledged to uphold these student privacy goals on a petition endorsed by the White House.

“Data collected on students in the classroom should be used for education,” Obama said in January. “To teach our children, not to market to our children.”

The wording of the draft bill may also allow loopholes on what qualifies as an “educational purpose,” Barnes says, because it could allow groups related to job recruitment or employment preparation to access student data.

“That goes against President Obama’s commitment to protect data for educational purposes,” she says.

The Parent Coalition for Student Privacy has also criticized the bill for not going far enough to secure data collected from school computers or for​ ensuring parents are kept in the loop about information brokers using the data.

“The bill doesn’t bar many uses of personal information that parents are most concerned about, including vendor redisclosures to other third parties, or data-mining to improve their products or create profiles that could severely limit student’s​ success by stereotyping them and limiting their opportunities,” said a press release from Rachael Stickland, Colorado co-chairwoman of the coalition. “This bill reads as though it was written to suit the purposes of for-profit vendors, and not in the interests of children.”