For Immediate Release: October 7, 2014

For more information contact:
Leonie Haimson, [email protected]; 917-435-9329
Rachael Stickland, [email protected]; 303-204-1272

While parents and advocates involved defeating inBloom are appreciative that the voluntary pledge released today by members of the software industry bars the selling of student data and its use for targeting ads, its provisions fall far short of what would be necessary to uphold the rights of parents to control access to their children’s personal information and protect their privacy. It appears that technology vendors and their supporters are trying to forestall stronger federal and state laws that would really hold them accountable.

The provisions do not include any parental consent or notification requirements before schools disclose the highly sensitive personal data of their children to vendors, and contain no specific security or enforcement standards for its collection, use or transmission. It would also allow for the infinite disclosure or sale of the data from one company to another, when the first one goes bankrupt, is merged or acquired by another corporation.

Leonie Haimson, Executive Director of Class Size Matters based in NYC and co-chair of the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy, said: “We need legally enforceable provisions requiring parental notification and consent for the disclosure and redisclosure of personal student data, as well as rigorous security protocols. This pledge will not achieve these goals, and will not satisfy most parents, deeply concerned about protecting their children from rampant data sharing, data-mining and data breaches.”

As Rachael Stickland, Colorado parent and co-chair of the Coalition pointed out, “The pledge explicitly allows for the use of student personal information for ‘adaptive learning.’ Parents are very worried that predictive analytics will lead to stereotyping, profiling and undermining their children’s future chance of success. At the least, industry leaders should support full disclosure of the specific student data elements employed for these purposes, and understand the need for informed parental consent.”

Said Melissa Westbrook, moderator of the Seattle Schools Community Forum and co-founder of Washington State’s Student Privacy Now, “This so-called pledge, filled with mumbo-jumbo, has one glaring item missing – legally enforceable punishment for K-12 service providers who don’t protect student data. Without that, students and their data have no real protections. ”

Concluded Josh Golin, Associate Director for the Campaign for Commercial-Free Childhood, “Across industries, self-regulation has been proven inadequate when it comes to protecting children, and there is absolutely no reason to believe that students’ most sensitive information can be safeguarded through voluntary pledges. Only federal and state legislation that have clear enforcement mechanisms and penalties will give students the protections – and parents the peace of mind – they deserve. It’s disappointing the ed tech industry’s main takeaway from the inBloom fiasco is that they need better PR.”

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