Immense Unease Over Advertisers Nabbing Student Data: Poll
As technology continues to seep into U.S. classrooms, an overwhelming number of parents and others worry that children's private information may not be secure.
A whopping 89 percent of Americans reported they are "very" or "somewhat" concerned about "advertisers using personal data about children to market to them," according to a nationally representative survey conducted by the Benenson Strategy Group on behalf of Common Sense Media, an advocacy group for children and families. The survey asked questions of 800 registered voters, including 227 parents, by phone earlier this month, and has a 3.5 percent margin of error.
The poll found that while only 37 percent of the public has "seen, read, or heard" "some" or "a great deal" about schools collecting, storing and sharing information, including age, weight and grades, 90 percent are "somewhat" or "very" concerned about private companies having access to student data.
"Student privacy and the protection of data is about to explode as an issue in the United States," said James Steyer, who heads Common Sense Media. "The numbers are off the charts. It's clear that students' personal and private information must not be for sale. Period."
Over the last few years, "data-driven instruction" has become a buzzword in education, with the idea behind it included in the pitches of education technology vendors and the federal government's Race to the Top -- District competition, in which school districts vie for cash in part by tailoring education plans to individual students (the Department used the phrase "personalized learning"). Proponents see technology that uses data collection as key to showing teachers which skills students are missing and what motivates learning. School districts are increasingly using cloud computing to store thousands of digital records for each student.
Because the field is new, it's largely unregulated.
Ninety-five percent of school districts in the U.S. rely on cloud computing, storing data on remote servers connected to the Internet, according to recent report from the Fordham University School of Law. The Fordham paper found that only one-fourth of districts tell parents about these services and one-fifth of districts don't have policies explicitly governing their use. Many contracts between districts and technology vendors don't have privacy policies, and less than 7 percent of the contracts restrict vendors from selling student information. The agreements rarely address security, according to the Fordham research.
Even advocates of increasing the use of data to inform education acknowledged the survey's implications.
"The survey points to the need for states, districts and schools to not only follow existing laws and regulations that govern the appropriate use of student data, and to make every effort to safeguard student privacy," said Dakarai Aarons, director of communications and external affairs for the Data Quality Campaign, a nonprofit that advocates using student information to improve instruction. "It's imperative that transparency exist so parents know what data is collected, who has access and for what purpose."
Common Sense Media is a San Francisco-based nonprofit that helps families navigate the world of technology and lists Chelsea Clinton, Ezekiel Emanuel, Robert Fisher and Geoffrey Canada as board members. The group has received major grants from the MacArthur Foundation, the Ford Foundation and the Anschutz Foundation.
In October, Common Sense Media sent a letter to 16 education technology vendorsasking them to restrict the use of student data to instructional purposes -- not commercial ones.
Steyer said in an interview that he first came across the privacy issue as co-chair of the LEAD Commission, a group President Barack Obama assembled to explore education technology. The LEAD Commission evolved into ConnectED, an Obama initiative that Immense Unease Over Advertisers Nabbing Student Data: Poll: