#Schoolprivacyzone: emerging best practices for a contentious issue
Advocacy group Common Sense Media held a summit in Washington, DC on Monday as part of a national campaign on the highly contested topic of student data privacy.
The results of Common Sense Media’s January survey show most parents concerned about student privacy.
A recent study by Fordham University Law School found that as schools and districts adopt cloud computing services, they are transferring student information to third-party providers, often leaving it open to data mining and commercial purposes such as reselling and ad targeting. These services may be in violation of federal law. These agreements allow vendors to do whatever they want with student demographic records and other personal information. Of the districts studied, fewer than 25% of the agreements between districts and vendors specified the purpose for disclosures of student information, and fewer than 7% restricted the sale or marketing of student information by vendors in any way. And that is to say nothing of the risk of hacking or other security breaches.
There are a number of attempts in the works to establish better guidelines for the $8 billion educational software industry. The Software&Information Industry Association, a trade group,