Yesterday the White House released its report on big data and privacy implications. The focus was broadly on big data, but there will be implications for ed tech, with several key recommendations specifically focused on the education sector. Specifically, there will be a push to update and revise the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA, enacted in 1974) and Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA, enacted in 2000). Education Week set the context quite well in its article:
FERPA, which was written before the Internet existed, is intended to protect disclosure of the personally identifiable information contained in children’s education records. And COPPA, which requires parental consent under certain conditions for the online collection of personal information from children under age 13, was written before the age of smartphones, tablets, apps, the cloud, and big data.
Think Progress, part of a group founded by John Podesta, who also led the White House study, summarized the key findings as follows:
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Giving consumers more protection and control over their private data with a bill of rights
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Pass a singular data breach law to prevent the next Target fiasco
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Strengthen outdated and archaic laws, such as the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), which dictates how the government accesses emails
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Give non-citizens the same privacy protections
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Ensure data collected on students is used only for educational purposes
Ed Tech Sections of the Report Itself:
First, there is a description of the situation in pages 24 – 26 that is too long to quote but worth highlighting: (more…)