Students and their families are backed into a corner. As students
across the United States are handed school-issued laptops and signed up
for educational cloud services, the way the educational system treats
the privacy of students is undergoing profound changes—often without
their parents’ notice or consent, and usually without a real choice to
opt out of privacy-invading technology.
Students are using
technology in the classroom at an unprecedented rate. One-third of all
K-12 students in U.S. schools use school-issued devices. Google Chromebooks account for about half of those machines.
Across the U.S., more than 30 million students, teachers, and
administrators use Google’s G Suite for Education (formerly known as
Google Apps for Education), and that number is rapidly growing.
Student
laptops and educational services are often available for a steeply
reduced price, and are sometimes even free. However, they come with real
costs and unresolved ethical questions.
Throughout EFF’s investigation over the past two years, we have found
that educational technology services often collect far more information
on kids than is necessary and store this information indefinitely. This
privacy-implicating information goes beyond personally identifying
information (PII) like name and date of birth, and can include browsing
history, search terms, location data, contact lists, and behavioral
information. Some programs upload this student data to the cloud
automatically and by default. All of this often happens without the
awareness or consent of students and their families.
In short,
technology providers are spying on students—and school districts, which
often provide inadequate privacy policies or no privacy policy at all,
are unwittingly helping them do it...
https://www.eff.org/wp/school-issued-devices-and-student-privacy
