Joel Reidenberg was quoted in a PBS Newshour article about student data privacy.
It’s impossible to know how companies could or would use the information they collect, said Joel Reidenberg, a privacy expert and law professor at Fordham University.
“What are they going to do with it? Are they going to use it for experimentation? Data analytics?” he said. “Will it wind up 10 years down the road being used in an insurance underwriting decision?”
School districts and their vendors are required to keep educational records confidential, under the 1974 federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. But the law, written at a time when protecting student data simply meant locking a filing cabinet, is ambiguous about some of the non-academic data now collected in schools.
“It’s not at all clear that what a child eats in the lunchroom would be considered an educational record,” Reidenberg said.
Regulating Third Parties
Fewer than 7 percent of school systems’ contracts for cloud computing services restrict vendors’ sale or marketing of student data, a 2013 study by Reidenberg and Fordham’sCenter on Law and Information Policy found. A quarter of districts using those services tell parents about their relationships with vendors. One in five don’t have policies governing the use of online services.School systems should be restricting the way their vendors use student data, Reidenberg said, and the 2013 study proves they are just not exerting that control. He worries what could happen if companies continue unrestricted.
“I don’t think it’s appropriate for commercial vendors to be able to data mine what a child is doing in a classroom and develop a commercial product to sell back to other school districts,” Reidenberg said.