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All posts by admin
Risks of using AI in the classroom
April 8, 2025
The annual conference of Network for Public Education, on whose board I sit, was held last weekend in Columbus, Ohio. It was terrific as usual, with wonderful speeches and incisive and illuminating workshops and panel discussions on how to strengthen our public schools and protect them from the depredations of budget cuts, privatization, and censorship. We also heard from Gov. Tim Walz, who gave an impassioned speech against Trump’s attempt to dismantle our education system. More about this here.
We also organized a workshop on the risks of using AI in the classroom, including the risks to student privacy, featuring our co-chair Cassie Creswell and Peter Greene, education guru and blogger.
Our presentation is here and embedded below. If your group would like a similar presentation, please email us at [email protected]
thanks,
Leonie Haimson, co-chair, Parent Coalition for Student Privacy
AI for NPE finalPresentation to the Data Privacy Working Group on the problems with DOE’s proposed privacy regs as well as their overall privacy policies and practices
March 5, 2025
Today, the DOE Data Privacy Working Group met for the first time, appointed by Chancellor Ramos to strengthen weaknesses in proposed revisions to Chancellors Regulations A 820 pertaining to student privacy, and the DOE’s overall data privacy policies and practices.
This meeting was very important, considering how over many years, DOE has long treated student personal data in an overly lax fashion, leading to numerous breaches and the sale and commercialization of their information – contrary to the state student privacy law, Ed Law 2D, passed in 2014.
Below is embedded our presentation to the Working Group, also post here in English and in Spanish.. It followed presentations from Dennis Doyle, DOE’s chief privacy officer, Louise DeCandia, NYSED Chief Privacy Officer, and Naveed Hassan, a parent member of the PEP who is a technology expert.
Much thanks to Maggie Sanchez, Co-founder of Protect NYC Special Education, for the Spanish translation!
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Watch our new video about Talkspace continuing violations of NYC teen privacy
Please watch the brief video above about how the online mental health company Talkspace, which has a $26M contract with the NYC Department of Health, continues to share NYC teen data with ad trackers and social media companies — the very same companies NYC is suing for undermining their mental health. This is despite our repeated letters to the Department of Health, raising our privacy concerns starting last September.
Also, check out this recent piece in Gizmodo, that reports that now Seattle and Baltimore schools also have similar contracts with Talkspace to provide free mental health to teens, with likely similar data privacy violations.
Moreover, as the Gizmodo article revealed, Talkspace is now developing a “Personalized Podcast” created through AI, that harvests patients’ personal mental health info from their therapy sessions and feeds it back to them in the form of a sound file. One can only imagine the damage this could cause to vulnerable teens if someone got hold of the sound files on their phones or they themselves played them back inadvertently in public. Not even considering how the use of AI chatbots can itself be perilous, as shown by the recent lawsuit filed by parents who allege that a chatbot caused their son to commit suicide.
One clarification: though the Gizmodo article notes that after we brought attention to this issue, ad-trackers were removed from the NYC Teenspace landing page, we found many other pages on its website are still collecting and disclosing teens’ personal data, as our video explains above, including the page featuring the new supposedly improved Teenspace Privacy Policy. We wrote about our findings in our most recent letter sent to the NYC Department of Health more than a month ago, and yet have gotten no response.
Parents: If your child has visited the Teenspace website or has signed up for their services, please contact us at [email protected] as soon as possible.
Continuing Teenspace privacy violations, despite assurances from city
January 8, 2025
Below is the letter PCSP, NYCLU and AI for Families sent yesterday to the NYC Department of Health, in response to their latest letter dated Dec. 18, 2024.
We were happy to learn that the Department of Health and Mental Health (DOHMH) is now requiring Talkspace to rewrite their contract providing online mental health services for NYC teens, as well as their Privacy Policy and Terms of Service to be more privacy protective, in response to the concerns we expressed on September 10 and October 17, 2024.
Yet we find the DOHMH claim in their latest missive that the Talkspace/Teenspace website has now eliminated the use of invasive ad trackers, cookies and personal information disclosures to social media platforms to be wholly inaccurate.
In this follow-up letter we discuss our findings and continuing concerns. We urge DOHMH to make more effective efforts to protect the privacy of NYC teens, including requiring Talkspace to build an entirely new website dedicated to NYC Teenspace services, free of trackers and disclosures, and that it undergo a privacy audit before making it live.
Talkspace should also be required to delete all the personal information already illegitimately collected and shared of NYC children, and make an apology and recompense to those families whose privacy was violated. We also ask why if Talkspace has violated its original contract as DOHMH has implied, whether they will be fined or suffer any penalty.
NYCLU PCSP AIF Reply to DOHMH re persistent privacy issues w. Teenspace 1.8.2025