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Chancellor to create a Work Group to improve the terrible privacy regs

Nov. 22, 2024

After our letter and more than 3,000 parent emails were sent to the new DOE Chancellor and members of the Panel for Educational Policy, she was alerted to the fact that their privacy regulations were not acceptable to parents and other members of the community.  Chancellor Ramos reached out, and last week we had a good meeting with her,  along with parent leaders and advocates, as well as many top DOE officials and legal staff on this issue.

The Chancellor was great and quickly agreed to our suggestion to create a working group that would collaborate to revise the regulations to so that students’ safety and privacy are not put at unacceptable risk by allowing the unrestricted release of their sensitive data.  At this point, the PEP vote on the regs is indefinitely postponed. Yesterday’s Politico Playbook briefly reported on this development.

Thanks so much for the letters of support sent in recent days from  UFT President Michael Mulgrew, Council Members Krishnan, Joseph, and Aviles, and the Center on Race and Digital Justice, urging the DOE to revise the regulations and restrict the disclosure of personal data to better ensure student privacy and safety, including to prevent the harassment and deportation of migrant children.  Those letters are below.

Council letter vs draft Chancellors regulations A-820 Mulgrew letter to Chancellor opposed to weakening of CR A-820 concerning student privacy Center on Race and Digital Justice letter to Chancellor
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Safeguarding your child’s personal data: Threat to student privacy from DOE’s use of digital learning, Teenspace, College Board, AI & more


Oct. 24, 2024

Last night we held a privacy briefing, pointing out the flaws in the privacy practices and policies of the NYC Dept. of Education.  Co-sponsored by AQE, and with the participation of Beth Haroules of NYCLU, it was well-attended, with lots of good questions .   We hope to have video soon.

For those who could not attend, you can  watch the video above and/or check out the slightly updated presentation here and below. If your parent or community group would like a similar briefing, please let us know by emailing us at [email protected] 
Privacy briefing 10.23.24 final

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Urge the NYC Chancellor to strengthen their proposed student privacy regulations now!

Please send a letter today to the NYC Schools Chancellor, the Dept of Education Chief Privacy Officer and the members of the Panel for Educational Policy,  the NYC school board, opposing proposed revisions to the regulations pertaining to student privacy.

These proposed revisions would essentially allow the NYC Dept. of Education to share the names, email addresses, phone numbers, home addresses, and birth dates of students with anyone they like, and with no restrictions except an unreliable parent opt out method. They would also weaken privacy protections for student health records as well as the security provisions in state law to defend against hacking and breaches.

The letter urges the DOE to postpone the vote on these regulations, now scheduled for Oct. 30, until they are fundamentally revised, and until DOE officials have met with parents and advocates to hear more about our concerns. A letter sent on behalf of Class Size Matters and the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy with more detail about these and other significant weaknesses in the proposed regulations is posted here and below.  Thanks!

Serious concern with proposed Chancellors regulation A-820 10.21.24
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Our follow-up letter to the City, reaffirming our concerns with Teenspace violations of student privacy

Oct. 17, 2024

On Sept. 10, along with NYCLU and AI for Families, we wrote the Mayor, the DOE Chancellor, and the Commissioner of  Health about our deep concerns with the way in which the online mental health company Teenspace allows for the sharing of personal information with unnamed third parties for marketing purposes in a manner that would be illegal if the contract was signed by the DOE rather than the Dept. of Health. Their parent company, Talkspace, is being paid $26 million over three years by the city to provide free counseling to students, and the Mayor, the Commissioner of Health and the DOE have all been aggressively encouraging NYC students to sign up for these services, with no mention of how their personal data may be used for predatory marketing and other commercial purposes which could further undermine their mental health.   More on this here.

On Sept. 23,  Dept. of Health responded, arguing that they did not have to abide by the state student privacy law since they were not an education agency, but assuring us that their contract was no less  protective.  On Oct. 8,  we received the Talkspace contract via a Freedom of Information Law request.

The contract did not dispel our concerns.  Since we sent our initial letter, we had discovered that when a NYC student visits the Teenspace website on their phone, their personally identifiable information is shared with 15 ad trackers and 34 cookies, as well as Facebook, Amazon, Meta, Google, and Microsoft among other companies, which we saw from using the Blacklight  privacy audit tool. These findings were later confirmed by a security company that does privacy analyses.  These findings are particularly concerning, given how the city is suing many of these companies for undermining children’s mental health and designing their platforms to be addictive  in order to maximize their revenues via targeted advertising.

Our follow-up letter to the Dept. of Health is  here and below, copied to  other city officials.  If you’d like to hear more about Teenspace and other threats to student privacy, please attend our privacy briefing on Wed. October  23 at 7 PM EST; you can register here.

NYCLU PCSP & AIF response to DOHMH regarding Teenspace privacy violations 2024.10.16