Student Privacy
Is protecting a student's data more or less important than outcomes?
My first child was born in 1997, before Facebook. I have stacks of home video of her learning to walk, taking her first bath, and waiving goodbye at kinder garden. All of these images are private and belong to her, meaning they’ve never been shared online by anyone but her.
By the time we welcomed my 4th, social media was just getting rolling. I posted regularly about his ups and downs and the silly things he did with photos included. Once, I posted a photo of him fishing. For some reason, this particular photo was very embarrassing to him and he was pretty angry that I’d posted it. I deleted it, along with all of the other photos of my kids. It was the first time I really started to think about the data we share about kids without their consent.
As technology continues to evolve in ways that very few anticipated, curating and selling user data is big business. There have been positive steps taken to prevent the inappropriate collection, storage, sale and distribution of student data but nearly all of them can be easily circumvented by a single person.
Too often, that single person is a teacher, doing their best to cobble together resources that the school or district has been slow to provide.
Here’s are some excerpts of privacy policy for 3 popular, free, tools that don’t require district approval to get started. I’m not picking on them because they’re egregiously worse, I picked these because they’re representative of what’s common.
Open AI (Chat GPT)
Our Service is not directed to children who are under the age of 13. OpenAI does not knowingly collect Personal Information from children under the age of 13. If you have reason to believe that a child under the age of 13 has provided Personal Information to OpenAI through the Service please email us at legal@openai.com. We will investigate any notification and if appropriate, delete the Personal Information from our systems. If you are 13 or older, but under 18, you must have consent from your parent or guardian to use our Services.
If you are a parent or guardian, you may review the information we have collected from your Child or ask us to make no further use of, or delete, such information. In your request, please include your name and your Child’s Kahoot username, and specify the action you would like us to take. For your Child’s protection, we may need to verify your identity before implementing your request. If your child uses our Services through his or her school, please contact the school or school district with any such request.
User-generated content, including comments, photographs, livestreams, audio recordings, videos, text, hashtags, and virtual item videos that you choose to create with or upload to the Platform (“User Content”) and the associated metadata, such as when, where, and by whom the content was created. Even if you are not a user, information about you may appear in User Content created or published by users on the Platform. When you create User Content, we may upload or import it to the Platform before you save or post the User Content (also known as pre-uploading), for example, in order to recommend audio options, generate captions, and provide other personalized recommendations. If you apply an effect to your User Content, we may collect a version of your User Content that does not include the effect.
A friend’s 12 old chid was using Chat GPT3, and the parent had not signed a consent form. Since the program wasn’t provided through the district, the student wasn’t covered through the district vetting process and data protection laws that govern schools. If the school put this product through it’s normal process, it wouldn’t make it.
Who okayed the use of OpenAI for her? A teacher. A well meaning professional who wanted a better way to engage a bunch of rowdy preteens with a fun tool that had stalled out in the district office. So she had them sign up, and the kid did because the teacher asked her to, and now her data is in their system without parental consent.
But even more importantly, without informed student consent. We don’t really know what happens to the data that goes in, and we don’t know how that data will be used in the future. As a country, and in many states, we’ve agreed this is true and passed laws like COPPA to require transparency to preserve student consent for when they are able to make an informed choice about what happens to private information about them.
LinkedIn (the only social media I still indulge) is ripe with suggestions that teachers use TikTok, Open AI, MidJourney and other tools built on these models now, in order to stay ahead of the curve and improve student outcomes.
But unlike ugly fishing photos, we can’t just delete the data that’s collected if a student decides later they don’t want it out there.
Worth it?