In 2017, a team of Carnegie-Mellon graduate students surveyed ed tech start -ups to see how the individuals involved in creating these businesses viewed the importance of protecting  student  privacy in the design of their products.  They found that it was a low priority for most of them — primarily because their investors did not appear to have a “meaningful interest” in the issue.

These are important findings with real -world consequences. Perhaps the low priority placed on privacy by ed-tech venture capitalists flows from the fact that the stronger the privacy protections, the less potential there will be reap profit from monetizing personal student data.

The results of the study were covered widely here and here.  Yet the link to the summary on the CMU website no longer works, so I asked the authors for a copy and it is posted it here and below.