California, the place where many tech companies exist, is way ahead of Maryland in protecting the data collected on students. Why? Because it is the same companies that are collecting data and selling it. CA has the strongest laws protecting their children.
The CA Attorney General put together their privacy position in this document.
https://oag.ca.gov/sites/all/
When is Maryland going to do the same? While we passed a k-12 student privacy law this year, it is much weaker than the CA law. Why? Because the CA tech companies spent millions to block the language that would hurt their revenue streams.
Please let Jack Smith, Superintendent of MCPS, know that enough is enough and get a CTO that knows how to protect our children's personal information, with or without laws to mandate it, within MCPS' tech platform or 3rd party vendors (via agreements). In addition, we need to mandate that collection of any data is at minimal (vs. PARCC/Pearson requiring student names to take the test when the purpose is to merely grade the school/county, not the student).
FYI: Where do you think Maryland is in this study?
The administrative tools that maintain vast stores of student data have posed governance challenges for school districts. A 2013 study by the Fordham Law School found that 95 percent of school districts nationwide relied on cloud services to maintain and manage student data. The study also found that the services were weakly governed, with 20 percent of districts failing to have policies for their use of cloud services. Fewer than 25 percent of the agreements between districts and cloud providers specified the purpose for disclosures of student data and fewer than seven percent restricted the sale or marketing of the data.10
What is MD/MCPS doing?
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzSJBowPECY