A week after California enacted a landmark law restricting the ways education technology companies can use the information they collect about elementary through high school students, a group of leading industry players is pledging to adopt similar data protections nationwide.
The 14 companies include: Microsoft; Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, the educational publishing house; Amplify, a developer of digital curriculums; and Edmodo, an online network for schools that allows teachers to assign homework and measure students' progress.
The participating companies are publicly committing themselves not to sell information on kindergartners through 12th graders. They have also pledged not to use students' data to target them with advertisements, and not to compile personal profiles of students unless authorised by schools or parents. The companies hope other educational technology providers will join them.
The pledge was developed by the Future of Privacy Forum, a think tank in Washington, in collaboration with the Software & Information Industry Association, a trade group. The groups said the initial signatories already adhere to these practices, but wanted to publicly articulate them now to allay some parents' unease with student-tracking software.
"We wanted to say to parents: 'No one's going to sell your kids' data; nobody's going to track your child around the Internet; no one's going to compile a profile that is used against your child when they apply for a job 20 years later,' " said Jules Polonetsky, executive director of the Future Privacy Forum, which has received financing from technology companies, including some of the signatories to the privacy pledge. "We hope this is a useful way for companies that want to be trusted partners in schools to make it clear they are on the side of responsible data use."
Although the pledge is not legally binding, companies that violate their own public representations on privacy could be subject to enforcement actions by the Federal Trade Commission.
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The effort comes at a pivotal moment for the growing software industry aimed at prekindergarten through 12th grade, a sector that generates $7.9 billion annually, according to trade group estimates. Schools across the country are increasingly adopting data-driven learning programs and apps; the software is aimed at recording the academic progress of individual students in real time and adapt lessons to the abilities of each student.
But after recent data breaches at major retailers and banks, along with the revelations of government data-mining by the whistle-blower Edward J Snowden, some parents have begun to publicly question whether school administrators have the capacity to monitor how their tech providers use students' data.
A 40-year-old federal law, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, or Ferpa, regulates the ways schools disclose information in a student's educational record. Privacy advocates have long complained that it has failed to keep pace with innovations in education technology.
The California student privacy statute, signed into law last week by Gov. Jerry Brown, is intended to update those data protections. Among other things, the measure prohibits companies from selling, disclosing or using for marketing purposes students' text messages, photos, voice recordings, online searches, location information, digital documents or any kind of student identification code.
For participating firms, the industry pledge effectively nationalises the California ban on companies using personal information about students for activities not authorised by schools.
"The pledge addresses some of the perceived weaknesses in Ferpa," said Steve Mutkoski, the government policy director for Microsoft's worldwide public sector business, "and does a good job consolidating many of the issues that have been raised in state legislation concerning how third-party service providers may use student data."
Participants must also agree to make clear disclosures about the types of information they collect and how they use it. Some legal experts noted that such voluntary efforts typically lacked oversight mechanisms.
"While the pledge has some strengths, there's no substitute for baseline federal protections," said Khaliah Barnes, the director of the student privacy project at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a research group in Washington. "While I've heard there are a lot of key players participating, other key players are not signing on."
Google, for instance, has posted its privacy policy for its education products, but is not participating in the pledge programme. Shannon Newberry, a spokeswoman for Google, declined to comment. Apple also is not participating, and a spokeswoman declined to comment.
Polonetsky of the privacy forum said he expected additional companies to sign on.
"If we're successful," he said, "we'll see a lot of companies stepping up."
©2014 The New York Times News Service
