President Obama is going to make
cybersecurity the focus of this week in the lead up to his January 20 State of the Union Address. Part of that push will be announced Monday, when he will call for strict legislation limiting the
commercial data-mining of children in schools.
The president is likely to cite as a model a landmark California law that passed last year with huge bipartisan support.
Once it takes effect next January, the California law will bar education technology companies from selling student data or using that data to create profiles of students or to target them with advertising. It specifically protects a long list of data that private companies might have access to through their work with schools, including students' grades, medical records, test scores, photos, text messages, food purchases, political affiliations, voice recordings and disciplinary records.
A federal version of the California law would vastly expand the narrow student privacy protections now on the books. […]
The chief federal privacy law, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, dates to 1974 — long before the computer age. It protects only official “educational records” maintained by the school. That means the vast streams of data students shed when they work online are not protected in most circumstances.
Companies can, and do, monitor student search histories and identify their locations and the type of computer equipment they're using. They can also track every keystroke as students work through online textbooks, quizzes and assignments to build intimate portraits of each child's academic abilities, learning styles and personality traits, such as whether they persevere through challenges or give up quickly.
Obama is also expected to highlight the voluntary privacy protection pledge that the Software & Information Industry Association's helped create, and which many educational tech companies have signed. That pledge commits companies to disclose the kinds of information they collect about students and the purpose for that collection, and is a promise that they won't sell the data or use it for commercial purposes. But there isn't any real restriction on their doing so, something Obama wants to change. The SIIA, not surprisingly, is opposed to the idea of legislation that would require them to do what they say they are doing voluntarily.