Data Privacy for Highschoolers
By Katie Cason | July 9, 2021
While I thankfully didn’t spend time in the supervision office in high school, I often heard of the troublemakers floating in and out of ‘Mr. Seidels Office’ for a wide range of things. If someone wasn’t called in for violence, cheating, or talking back in class, they were reprimanded because of something they had posted on social media or an incriminating text they had sent.
Having graduated highschool 5 years ago now, the rise of minors on social media and with smart phones brings me to question the big issue of data privacy for highschool students. However, as learning has shifted to being remote because of the Covid-19 pandemic, I imagine that this has become a much larger issue.
Screening Highschool Students’ Social Media with AI
One specifically concerning application of AI is the use of big data analytics to screen students’ social media accounts for potential violence. Many highschool administrations have been turning to this type of technology to prevent violence and bad things from happening on their campuses. While one can see the good that could come from this form of prevention, students do not consent to this intrusion of their privacy. This could also be harmful to students who are flagged incorrectly- ie. the potential for false positives from this technology could be detrimental to a students’ relationship with the adults at school. And lastly, many educators are not trained to use big data, and they are not qualified to monitor the public to reprimand people.
Covid-19 Bringing Students Online and Their Privacy into Question
With the onset of the global pandemic in March 2020, high school students shifted entirely to online learning meaning that every engagement with their educators was through an online platform. These platforms include and are not limited to Zoom, Skype, Babbel, Brainpop, and Honorlock to enable teachers and students to interact through video conferencing, classroom activities, message communication, and test proctoring. The first concerning point about the use of these platforms is that due to the extensive and inconvenient amount of technical jargon in the privacy policies of these educational digital tools, students and teachers do not know what data is being collected about them. A simple data breach could bring their worlds’ crashing down. As the people in charge rushed to transition schools online, legal requirements for privacy agreements were often waived. Additionally, many of the online tools used initially were free methods found by teachers; eventually, these tools became un-free and students and teachers coughed up credit card information bringing up the issue of the security of financial information. There is overwhelming concern among parents over the selling of their children’s data to big tech firms.
It is clear that the convenience and efficiency of technological tools to school administrators and teachers often causes them to overlook the potential harms it could cause their students. There is little legislation in place to protect minors and their data privacy especially when it can be seen as protecting others. This is an issue like that of many data privacy issues in that legislators are slow to catch up with the fast paced innovations of the tech industry.
References:
https://flaglerlive.com/120860/social-sentinel-pt/
https://gizmodo.com/schools-are-using-ai-to-check-students-social-media-for-1824002976