Joel Reidenberg was quoted in an eSchoolNews 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? 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 information 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.
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“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.
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The pledge, which was started in 2014 and has 275 signatories, including Apple and Google, can be enforced by the Federal Trade Commissions if a company is found to violate its promise.
But despite the pledge and states’ efforts to replicate the California law, Reidenberg said many states are too focused on making sure the data isn’t used for marketing and advertising. States also need to worry about whether the data that’s collected is being used for secondary purposes, such as using a student’s performance to develop and sell a curriculum, how long the information is kept, whether parents have a right to know who is using their children’s data, and if there is a means to correct inaccurate data.
“It’s just a whole host of good data practices, fair data practices that are not covered by a statute focused only on marketing,” he said.