Digital Privacy: A Student Right Trampled Upon by Nearly Every School System

Do you really know where your child’s data is being stored by your local system? Do you know what data is being collected? Do you know your local board policy about student data privacy rights? Do they have a clear policy defining what data is being collected and how that data is being protected? Is your child’s school system even following that policy?

Student Data: Any information that a school system collects and stores about students. Examples would be(and are not limited to) benchmark data, TCAP data, developmental reading assessments, security camera footage, ID card swipes to enter a building, school issued laptop information, GMail accounts

As soon as they take at TCAP assessment, your child’s data is no longer being stored locally. Take that to the bank. I have heard one board member state that student writing assessments were graded by non-English speakers in another country. If that is true, your child’s assessment data is already in another country…not to mention the questionable assessment practice itself.

I see the laptops that my kids bring home. They have Google accounts which I didn’t create. It is highly likely your child’s whereabouts are being tracked by that computer. It is nearly certain that their internet habits, acquaintances, location habits, and much more are being tracked by an external source. That external source could be the school system itself and/or a website that the student has logged into.

Here is the nasty part of all of this. Many of these academic benchmarks are being used as defacto IQ assessments. IQ data is health information. Did you ever think to ask if sharing your child’s testing results in a room full of educator’s is a violation of HIPPAA? I could make a great case that sharing it with anyone other than the direct teacher of that child and a single building administrator is a direct violation of FERPA.

Parents, you need to know WHO has access to your child’s data. You need to know WHERE that data is stored? You need to know WHY that data is being collected and how it is being used? Not only that, you need to know where the servers are that data passes through. You need to know the details of your child’s school GoogleMail accounts. Who has access to that? Where is that communication being stored? It ain’t being stored locally.

I read an article today that if you post a single photo of your child online, AI can perform an analysis which reveals far more information than you can imagine. Now, take a second and think about what AI can learn from your child’s emails and testing data. The title of the article is, “AI Can Stalk You w/ a Single Vacation Photo.” Here is just one of the alarming excerpts from that article:

So AI has huge implications for privacy. These were only hammered home when Anthropic reported recently that they had discovered that under the right circumstances (with the right prompt, placed in a scenario where the AI is asked to participate in pharmaceutical data fraud) Claude Opus 4 will try to email the FDA to whistleblow. This cannot happen with the AI you use in a chat window — it requires the AI to be set up with independent email sending tools, among other things. Nonetheless, users reacted with horror — there’s just something fundamentally alarming about an AI that contacts authorities, even if it does it in the same circumstances that a human might.

As parents, we need to have a very high bar set for the expectation of our children’s privacy. As Americans, we have often wrongly accepted that we don’t have a right to privacy. Well, in fact you do have a right to your own privacy and to that of your family’s. I don’t think school systems are being good stewards of student data. I bet an independent audit would reveal this. I would suggest 99.9% of the people in school systems have zero idea where student data is being stored. Oh sure, they will tell you the company answer. But do they really know what servers it has passed through? As a parent, do you really know who is looking at benchmark and TCAP scores? I bet you don’t. How do I know this? Because I have seen who has access to individual student data, and it is WAAAAAY more folks than you likely think.

We need to update our BOE policies and have published locations for where every, single bit of information (of data gathered by our schools systems or system vendors) is stored and where it passed through to get to that point. Thirty years ago, it was very easy to account for where student information was stored. Not so today.

Student privacy is a right. We need to know the locations of the servers student data is stored. We need to know if there is end-to-end encryption on all data. Here is a hint….all of it isn’t encrypted end-to-end. With the MASSIVE(and I mean massive) amounts of information being collected from our students in the form of benchmarks, TCAP, GMail, student surveys, security cameras, school issued laptops, student ID card swipes, and more….we have every right to know how are children are being tracked, the purpose of that tracking, and who has access to that data…AND whether that tracking is even legal.

ALL of that data should be guarded in the same way that their health information is guarded. There need to be limits on who can view that data. Anytime an educator(or anyone else!!!) looks at your child’s data and information, there should be a record of that. There should be a very, very short list of who can see that data.

Pro-Tip: Are your child’s social media accounts being monitored? If a student accesses a local school system’s network on their own device and forgets to log off, they could inadvertently be providing the system information about all sorts of things. Does a school system employee software to monitor your child on social media? Here is another alarming article from Education Week:

Technologies that monitor students’ online activity have become more popular in schools as a way to respond to rising gun violence and mental health issues among students. Nearly 9 in 10 teachers say that their school monitors students’ online activities, and 40 percent say that their school monitors students’ activity on their personal devices such as when a student uses the school’s network or is logged into a school account. Thirty-seven percent of teachers say that their school or district monitor what students post publicly on social media.