Spying on Students: School-Issued Devices and Student Privacy

I used to work in school IT and had products pitched to us constantly that would be basically malware/RATs to spy on students. We could purchase anything that would help us look at Facebook messages, emails, documents/picture, anything really. Our department went against it for a few reasons:

- If you have this knowledge you need to monitor it. If a student is writing about killing themselves in a document on their machine then they follow through and we had access to that knowledge it becomes our problem.

- Opens us up to far more knowledge than we had before, knowledge we didn't necessarily want. Kids are kids. We're trying to make adults and should give them a certain amount of free reign to learn and make mistakes without us watching them all the time.

- Our IT department just didn't feel that it was the best idea and agreed with it on moral/ethic grounds.

EDIT: I should also clarify that all of these tools went beyond what we would need to administer devices from an IT standpoint. Our other tools were more stop a malicious PDF than read little Johnny's email.

Created a throwaway just for this as I'd like to remain anonymous. I'm currently in high school, though I picked up programming early. My school decided to purchase a bunch of "educational" tablets for the student populace a while back (wasting a million or so in the process). All in all, they were a disaster. Not only were they not used for their intended purpose, they were a huge distraction in the classroom. Kids would be watching youtube videos, and worse, through the various proxy sites the school could never seem to block, all when they should have been paying attention. I wouldn't be surprised if performance dropped as a result.

That aside, I couldn't agree more with the issues in the report. There was no opt-out: no tablet meant no grades. You'd be a fool to expect any privacy. It was obvious school officials had some form of remote access: they could in theory lock the screen (this was easily circumvented by going offline), but to what degree, we couldn't be sure. For all I knew, they could have live access to the camera and microphone.

From this experience, it seems pretty clear that just throwing technology at students in hopes it helps them "learn" isn't going to work. The money wasted on this program could have been put to much better use, training teachers and actually buying books.

Does anyone here have experience with approaching their districts?

I had a meeting last year with three assistant superintendents to discuss issues related to student privacy. New York has a student privacy law (§2-d of EDC Title 1 Article 1) passed as part of the Common Core Reform Act that establishes a Parents' Bill of Rights for Data Privacy and Security, which must be completed 120 days after its effective date of 12/08/2016. Among other things, this document must list all third parties to which student PII is provided, for what purpose, and state that they take the proper precautions to protect student data. That date---04/07/2017---has since passed. Unfortunately, my district (and possibly the entire county, Erie) is far behind.

We also discussed school devices---they're moving toward a device-per-child model---and we expressed to one-another our concerns. The EFF's resources were essential in my research and provided resources for the district as well.

The EFF was kind enough to put me in touch with a lawyer practicing in NY with an interest in student privacy to provide pro bono counsel as I figure out the best way to move forward. I'm going to try my hardest to keep on good terms with the district; going the route of issuing FOIA requests and such is a last resort. Finding other concerned parents in my district is likely my next step.

My oldest son is entering first grade this year, so this is a fairly urgent priority for me.

Why is there so little scrutiny over Chromebooks in schools? Every time this topic is raised, people rush to Google's defence. Yes, I know Google doesn't create advertising profiles from student data. This doesn't make their data collection behaviour defensible. They are still capturing student data in staggering quantities.

Even if the data is "anonymous" (a meaningless term) and aggregated in some form, this is still an unimaginably huge quantity of student data that Google have captured and saved for themselves.

Rather than ask what kind of tracking is acceptable, we should instead ask: why is tracking of students (who have no choice in the matter) even considered acceptable in the first place?

OT: Anyone know why a comment in this post went dead in less than 4 minutes? It was pretty substantive and didn't contain anything inflammatory, although the author did say he was using a throwaway.

link to comment (you need enable showdead in settings to read it): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15108272

For some terrible reason, societies tend to believe that the younger you are, the less deserving of rights you are. Even rights such as this, where having privacy would carry less risk than an older person perhaps seeing dangerous things from the younger people. They still do the wrong thing and rob the younger people of their human rights. (Dangerous here means that in most countries, if you eyes or ears detect lewd behavior under a certain age, you go to jail.)

Kids should have absolutely no expectation of privacy.