With Tech Taking Over in Schools, Worries Rise
 |
| Students in Oklahoma City. A patchwork of state laws is taking on concerns over third-party collection and use of student data. Sue Ogrocki/Associated Press |
At a New York state elementary school, teachers can use a behavior-monitoring app to compile information on which children have positive attitudes and which act out. In Georgia, some high school cafeterias are using a biometric identification system to let students pay for lunch by scanning the palms of their hands at the checkout line. And across the country, school sports teams are using social media sites for athletes to exchange contact information and game locations.
Technology companies are collecting a vast amount of data about students, touching every corner of their educational lives — with few controls on how those details are used.
Now California is poised to become the first state to comprehensively restrict how such information is exploited by the growing education technology industry.
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.
“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, a Democrat who wrote the bill.
Gov. Jerry Brown has not taken a public position on the measure, or on a related student privacy bill regulating school contracts with education technology vendors. If he does not act, the bills will become law at the end of this month. Senator Steinberg said the bills had broad bipartisan support and were likely to be enacted.
James P. Steyer, chief executive of Common Sense Media, a children’s advocacy and media ratings group in San Francisco, said the bills were ultimately intended to shore up parents’ trust in online learning.
“You can’t have an education technology revolution without strong privacy protections for students,” said Mr. Steyer, whose group spearheaded the passage of Mr. Steinberg’s bill. “Parents, teachers and kids can now feel confident that students’ personal information can be used only for educational achievement.”
In a sign of the rapid growth of the education technology industry, even Mr. Steyer’s group has partnerships with Google, Apple, Amazon and other companies that distribute the group’s educational materials and its ratings of games and apps for children.
The California effort comes at a pivotal time for the industry. Schools nationwide have been rushing to introduce everything from sophisticated online portals, which allow students to see course assignments and send With Tech Taking Over in Schools, Worries Rise - NYTimes.com: