"Montgomery Co. Public Schools agreed this spring to [Shear's] idea of deleting the student internet histories from the servers of 3 of its biggest vendors: Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Apple Inc.& GoGuardian"

For Maryland lawyer Bradley Shear, his push to protect the data privacy of children became an obsession three years ago when his son, who was in the second grade, was accused by a teacher of googling a profane song in class.

Mr. Shear was convinced his son landed on the webpage by accident, but it brought to mind a troubling question: How long would this incident stick to his son’s digital record?

Starting next month, he won’t have to worry about it. Mr. Shear convinced his son’s school district to wipe clean most of the digital data that the school and its largest outside vendors keep on more than 162,000 students starting as young as kindergarten. It is among the first school districts in the country to schedule an annual purging of student data.

Mr. Shear, who wants “Data Deletion Week” to go national, says he is worried that information stored on distant servers could come back to harm children who make mistakes on social media or with the apps that have become ubiquitous in classrooms.

“I’m a big believer in having a bad day,” he says. But “we’re entering a phase where there’s no such thing as a second chance” as universities and prospective employers are mining more digital clues when making admissions and hiring decisions.

Data generated in the classroom is becoming a heated front in the battle over digital privacy, but privacy experts say the issue is more complicated than it might seem...

...School officials acknowledge “Data Deletion Week” won’t plug all the privacy holes, noting that Montgomery County teachers and administrators now use roughly 1,000 apps and websites to help organize classrooms and promote new forms of learning, each of which has its own policy for collecting and storing data. The district plans to evaluate contracts with all of them and add to the deletion requirement list. It said it can’t purge all student data; it is required by law to retain some records. Parents and students have the right to request that some data be retained...

https://www.wsj.com/articles/one-parent-is-on-a-mission-to-protect-children-from-digital-mistakes-11562762000