On Monday, two U.S. Congressmen — U.S. Rep. Jared Polis and U.S. Rep. Luke Messer — introduced into Congress a bill called the Student Digital Privacy and Parental Rights Act. And honestly, it’s a little bit confusing.
The bill would prohibit companies that operate Internet-based school services, such as online homework portals, digital grade books for teachers and online educational games, from using or spreading students’ personal information. Essentially, it places limits on how much information education technologies can collect about kindergarten through 12th-grade students, and how they can use it.
The bill comes on the backs of a controversy in which Pearson Education, an education publishing company, had been spying on students’ social media accounts to see which students were discussing recent standardized test questions. The Student Digital Privacy and Parental Rights Act is not necessarily a response to that, but would certainly stop things like that from happening again.
The bill is likely to be opposed by education privacy advocates, who say that the bill does not do enough to protect students’ privacy, and industry groups that favor self-regulation, who don’t want to get the government more involved than it needs to be.
“All this bill does is add additional legal hurdles for innovating educational services,” said an executive at an unnamed technology trade group in an email to associates Friday. The email was forwarded to a New York Times reporter on the conditions that the writer of the email not be identified.
The concerns of the writer of the email echo the concerns of those who say that this bill could stifle innovation, which is always a scary term, in the digital education sector. “Adaptive learning products,” such as learning games that get harder or easier based on your knowledge, or online textbooks that learn how fast you read, are just beginning to infiltrate the classroom environment. These sites and apps depend on the information that companies get from schools to operate efficiently.
Most of that data isn’t protected by the existing federal student privacy law because it’s not part of a student’s official educational record, which basically consists of test scores, grades and anything else of the sort. That law, however, dates back to 1974, and doesn’t address educational technology because there was barely any back then. That’s why this new bill is so important.
“Our belief is that this is a reasonable floor of protection,” Messer told Politico Monday. “Time and the future development of technology will determine how much further states will want to go. If we haven’t gone far enough, we believe states will send us the message that it needs to be done.”
Parents and privacy experts, however, are skeptical. Parents are understandably weary that school districts lack the resources necessary to ensure their children’s records are safe, and privacy experts agree. Experts say the bill has loopholes that would allow schools to use information for purposes that are not necessarily entirely educational.
As a substitute for the bill, the educational technology industry is championing a voluntary Student Privacy Pledge, which has so far been signed by 125 ed tech companies, including big names such as Apple and Google. Messer and Polis incorporated some of the language from the pledge into their bill.
It might be a bit excessive that ed tech companies are saying this bill will “stifle innovation.” There isn’t anything that we can see in this bill that says that ed tech companies can’t grow. They just can’t use children’s personal information to tailor games and advertisements to their intelligence level. And think about that: maybe that’s a good thing. This is children’s information.
But there’s also a big spectrum of what “personal information” consists of. The vocabulary words that children are learning in school or the level of math that they’re at is a lot different than their credit card information. It’s hard to be totally against this when it could very well be beneficial.
If this data was only meant to enhance their educational experience and be used from an educational standpoint, we should take every opportunity to use the digital tools we have at our disposal today for the betterment of education. It’s easy to get into a tricky place over what data is educational and what isn’t, but that’s a whole other issue.
In terms of potential benefits that could result without the privacy regulations, by prohibiting these items, you’re guaranteeing that no students will see the benefits. For example, you have a student who is taking chemistry who doesn’t know about Quizlet as a resource, and educational companies were able to see that the student is taking chemistry and advertise Quizlet as an option to help them study, that would be really cool and not at all a bad thing. It is situations such as this one where a privacy-protecting bill is simply unnecessary and could actually inhibit innovation.
It’s kind of troubling — and ironic — that the government has to remind companies to not spy on our personal information, and making the Internet even more personalized than it already is makes us a bit weary. But if the information stays in the educational sphere, we’re all for learning games.
