Montgomery County parents petition MCPS and Maryland Attorney General to stop the mining of MCPS students' personal information for race-based profiling and advertising by private vendors.

Following reports by The Markup, Montgomery County parents petition MCPS and Maryland Attorney General to stop the mining of MCPS students' personal information for race-based profiling and advertising by private vendors. The Petition is open for signatures and available here: https://chng.it/GQkPm4X6DV

This Private Equity Firm Is Amassing Companies That Collect Data on America’s Children

Over the past six years, a little-known private equity firm, Vista Equity Partners, has built an educational software empire that wields unseen influence over the educational journeys of tens of millions of children. Along the way, The Markup found, the companies the firm controls have scooped up a massive amount of very personal data on kids, which they use to fuel a suite of predictive analytics products that push the boundaries of technology’s role in education and, in some cases, raise discrimination concerns...

https://themarkup.org/machine-learning/2022/01/11/this-private-equity-firm-is-amassing-companies-that-collect-data-on-americas-children?fbclid=IwAR0oYmbAgalvMWj0dtGYH8QyvfuiSAwTXVg4j28HYG2IivdKlRAmro7Vrng

Google to pay $170 million to settle charges it violated kids’ privacy law on YouTube

Google will pay $170 million to settle allegations it illegally collected data about children younger than 13 who were watching toy videos and television shows on YouTube, state and federal officials announced Wednesday, part of a record punishment that some in government criticized as too lenient.

Regulators charged that Google knew certain YouTube channels were popular among younger viewers, touted this fact to brands and advertisers, and tracked kids’ viewing histories for the purpose of serving them targeted advertisements, ultimately raking in “millions of dollars” as a result of its repeated violations of federal children’s privacy laws.

In response, Google agreed to the record fine to resolve charges with the Federal Trade Commission and the attorney general of New York, which are set to announce their findings at a news conference in Washington. The tech giant also must adapt its business practices, halting data collection on YouTube videos that are clearly created with kids in mind and requiring video creators to label content that’s intended for young audiences...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/09/04/google-pay-million-settle-charges-it-violated-kids-privacy-law-youtube/

MCPS selects another "parent portal, student portal, and gradebook into one big system"

..."We had over 900 people participate in the selection process, including parents, students, and all of our union partners," said Dr. Kara Trenkamp, Director of Technology Integration and Learning Management Systems. "Our teachers were wowed by Synergy. For the first time they had a vision of a student information system that could truly serve them by connecting the parent portal, student portal, and gradebook into one big system in which all of the parts communicate, giving users a complete profile of what they're looking for."..

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/montgomery-county-public-schools-md-120000547.html

"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

FBI PSA: EDUCATION TECHNOLOGIES: DATA COLLECTION AND UNSECURED SYSTEMS COULD POSE RISKS TO STUDENTS

The FBI is encouraging public awareness of cyber threat concerns related to K-12 students. The US school systems’ rapid growth of education technologies (EdTech) and widespread collection of student data could have privacy and safety implications if compromised or exploited...


https://www.ic3.gov/media/2018/180913.aspx