As technology expands into nearly every facet of school life, more state legislatures are intervening to limit how all that student data can be used after it is collected, the New York Times reported.
The latest, and most comprehensive, legislation has gained support in California and is expected to become law later this month. The bill’s author, Democrat Sen. Darrell Steinberg, told the Times that the law would “put the onus on Internet companies to do the right thing.”
“The California statute is filling the void,” Joel R. Reidenberg, a professor at Fordham Law School and education privacy law expert, told the Times. “They are modernizing the protection of student privacy for the computer era in schools.”
The legislation would prohibit educational sites, apps and cloud services from selling or disclosing student information or using the data to build files on the students or market to them, among other things, according to the Times. Companies are, however, allowed to utilize the data for “legitimate research purposes.”
“You can’t have an education technology revolution without strong privacy protections for students,” James P. Steyer, chief executive of Common Sense Media, a key proponent of the California law, told the Times. “Parents, teachers and kids can now feel confident that students’ personal information can be used only for educational achievement.”
The education technology, which generated about $7.9 million in sales last year, is now used in nearly every aspect of the school day in some districts throughout the country. Many of the applications are used to assess the abilities of students, which can be disconcerting to parents who worry about how this data might influence their child’s future.
“Different websites collect different kinds of information that could be aggregated to create a profile of a student, starting in elementary school,” Tony Porterfield, a software engineer and father of two sons in Los Altos, Calif., told the Times. “Can you imagine a college-admissions officer being able to access behavioral tracking information about a student, or how they did on a math app, all the way back to grade school?”
So far, 36 states have introduced legislation attempting to protect student information and security, and about 30 of those measures passed. Most of these bills were aimed at specific aspects of data collection and distribution. For example, Florida prohibits districts from collecting student biometrics, such as fingerprints.