Your Child’s School Probably Collects Tons of Data About Them.
We live in a time when cyberbullying, self-harm, suicide and school shootings are all parents and educators need to worry about. And as technology became more prevalent in the classroom, the obvious solution was born – keeping track of what our kids are looking for, reading, viewing, and writing to look for red flags.
As a result, schools and tech companies no longer just store data related to grades and attendance; now they have a lot more. And many parents are concerned that some of this data might come back to bite them later. The Guardian reports:
This is not a distant concern. Teens are already facing the consequences of their online behavior. In 2017, Harvard canceled admissions for at least 10 incoming students for sharing racist and obscene jokes on a private Facebook group chat. This year, Harvard canceled an offer to recruit Kyle Kashuv, a conservative activist based in Parkland, Florida, due to racist comments he made in text messages and generally Google Doc at the age of 16, and the decision drew strong reactions. nationwide debate.
Parents in the US told the Guardian that they fear detailed educational data about their children – such as how quickly they complete their homework – will be placed in a huge black box in the data mining industry. Companies have long been collecting, exchanging, and selling vast amounts of data on online behavior and consumer purchases, information that is also combined with publicly available voter data to create targeted political ads. People have little opportunity to know how their data is transferred from one company to another, and there is no way to prevent frequent and gigantic data breaches.
A group of parents at Montgomery County public schools in the Washington, DC suburb have fought for an annual Data Deletion Week to cleanse most of their students’ digital tablets of the district, technology companies, and online apps they use. And the program can be the first and only one of its kind.
The initiative was spearheaded by one of the parents, Bradley Shear, a social media and privacy lawyer who was attending a conference for privacy law scholars when he received a phone call about his son. His son, who was in second grade at the time, was in trouble for googling a song, fuck Ceelo Green on his school laptop, which Shear says The Guardian happened by accident when a Google search is auto-populated.
Shire wanted to make sure the data was erased by GoGuardian , which had a contract with the district to track student searches and website visits.
How to start a Data Deletion Week in your area
Not every district will benefit from having a group of parents who are advocates and experts on security, privacy, and policy. But those parents proved that with some persistence, regular data deletion can be done.
Shire began by meeting with district officials to discuss his concerns, and then with his district’s parent-teacher organization, which had already established a “safe technology committee.” He found support where one of the committee members told the Guardian that she had the same experience as Shire and his son:
She said that her then eight-year-old son typed ‘save the earth’ when he was doing the book preservation report, “and the Ku Klux Klan came into being … ‘Save the earth, join the clan.” He didn’t know what it was, ”she said.
When she spoke with the teacher and offered to erase the search results from her son’s browser history, the teacher said it was impossible, the parent recalls.
However, simply getting the district to agree to the purge and change its policies was not enough. Parents and school officials worked together to sort through each of the district’s contracts with various technology companies to see what was possible and what language needed to be changed.
And finally, a simple “no problem, we deleted it” from third-party companies was not enough – they needed official letters confirming that the data was completely deleted, and not just saved and “anonymized”.