e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: UBC

  • Piazza Makes Three Significant Changes To Deal With Privacy Issues

    Piazza Makes Three Significant Changes To Deal With Privacy Issues

    For those following the Piazza privacy issues, we have a new update where the company has made three significant changes in their response to privacy concerns from several universities. They are now using true opt-in for their Careers product, they have stopped the practice of using university logos without permission, and they are now offering an easier process to enter into no-cost agreements. For those who have not followed, read here here and here for background. And remember that this case of Piazza’s usage of student data can be seen as a case study on third-party learning apps as we move closer to the Next Generation Digital Learning Environment / LMS as Hub concept.

    Opt-In vs Opt-Out

    In my original post, one of the key issues I called out was that Piazza did not offer with their Q&A platform a true opt-in method for students to choose to allow their personal data to be shared with recruiters through the Careers product.

    What does that opt-in look like in practice? Faculty assign usage of the platform, and during setup students see a pre-checked box labeled “Sign me up” for opting into the Careers service. (more…)

  • University Responses to Piazza: Some good, some bad, some web site changes

    After our reporting from Nov 10 on “Popular Discussion Platform Piazza Getting Pushback For Selling Student Data”, I was invited by Piazza CEO Pooja Sankar to visit the Piazza offices. During my visit, we had an open conversation where I got to meet pretty much the entire staff and have a direct conversation with Sankar and Sunthar Premakumar. After that meeting, Piazza provided a statement that we published in “Piazza Response To Blog Post On Student Privacy”. The statement primarily dealt with a mea culpa from Piazza about working directly with institutions to form agreements around privacy policies and terms of use, including this section:

    We are committed to fixing this. In fact we already have started. We have entered into agreements with Georgia Tech and Brown, and have ongoing engagement with Stanford, UBC and UC Davis[1]. In our conversations universities have been very happy with our policies, practice, and compliance. We are fully committed to entering into contracts with universities that protect students, professors, and the institutions including FERPA, accessibility, and more.

    I have subsequently had conversations with staff from several of the schools mentioned above to verify the information. Some of the responses were good (as in positive review for Piazza and their willingness to work with the school), some were bad, and in parallel I noticed several web site changes that appear to be related to this reporting and follow-up. (more…)

  • Piazza Response To Blog Post On Student Privacy

    Based on Thursday’s blog post “Popular Discussion Platform Piazza Getting Pushback For Selling Student Data”, Piazza’s CEO Pooja Sankar invited me to meet at their offices Friday afternoon. Given the nature of Thursday’s post, I offered to publish any statement that Piazza had in response here at e-Literate, an offer they accepted. I will defer further analysis for a few days.  – PH

    Update: In the process of making copy-editing changes, we accidentally temporarily removed links accessibility and FERPA compliance documentations. They have been restored to the current draft.

    Sorry about that.

    Statement From Piazza CEO Pooja Sankar

    We at Piazza take our obligations to our community of students, professors, and institutions of higher education very seriously. We cherish and safeguard the privacy of our community. But we made a mistake by not engaging and responding to a way befitting of the trust placed in us. Many of our 1500 Universities reached out quite reasonably to enter into legal agreements for the free service. But as a lean, sub-30 person company without in-house legal, we were overwhelmed with all the (expensive) requests for one-off contracts (for a free Q&A service). We handled it poorly. This unfortunately gave people the impression that we were arrogant. You deserve better. We can do better. (more…)