Like many students around the world, my daughter began her school year looking at a computer screen at home. This was her first day of school, ever. With this new era of online learning we have also entered a new era of data collection. This includes recordings of students’ images, names, voices, and conversations with their teachers and other students. While video conference providers like Zoom have made strides in security, data is still being created, collected, and, perhaps most importantly, stored in some fashion every hour of every school day. The disclosure of that data, whether lawful or not, presents some very real risks to our children’s, and even our own, privacy.
We have several pieces of federal legislation aimed at protecting our children and their data from the big scary dark corners of the Internet, but the United States still lags behind Europe in the enactment of adequate data privacy protections. In fact, the United States has not yet risen to the level of presumed adequate protection afforded to Canada, New Zealand, and other countries. (See the General Data Protection Regulation.)
Probably the most relevant of those laws in the United States is the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). Despite serving as a privacy rule, FERPA specifically authorizes the disclosure of “educational records” without written parental consent. However, as with most laws, there are a few exceptions—some you might expect and a few that might get a little gray. Here is a handy chart of the four most commonly used exceptions from the Department of Education. Additionally, so long as the data has been “de-identified,” the data can be freely disclosed regardless of the reason.
We have always asked teachers to do a lot, and we don’t seem to be taking much off their plate lately. Besides having to actually teach our kids, we ask them to be body guards, infectious disease screeners, and count day experts responsible for keeping the school funded. Now it seems we can add data security expert to that list of roles.