Have we really learned anything about schools during the pandemic?
School districts and creators of the sites have defended their use, and some corporations say the researchers made a mistake by adding the programs’ homepages, which included tracking codes, to their exam, rather than restricting their research to the academics’ internal pages, which they said contained less or no trackers. The researchers defended the paintings by pointing out that academics had to log into the homepages before their categories could begin.
The coronavirus pandemic has disrupted the lives of young people around the world, ending schools for more than 1. 5 billion students in just a few weeks. Although some study rooms have reopened, tens of millions of students remain remote and many now rely on educational applications. for the maximum of their school days.
However, there has been little public discussion about how the corporations that have provided the systems on which distance learning is based have taken credit for the pandemic providence of student data.
The learning app Schoology, for example, says it has more than 20 million users and is used in 60,000 schools in some of the largest school districts in the United States. A unique identifier on the student’s phone, known as an advertising ID, that marketers use to track other people across other apps and devices and to create a profile about the products they might use.
A representative of PowerSchool, which evolved the app, referred all questions to the company’s privacy policy, which stated that it did not collect advertising identifiers and did not provide student knowledge to corporations for marketing purposes. But the policy also states that the company uses third-party equipment to display targeted ads to users based on their “browsing history on other emails or devices. “The policy does not specify which third-party corporations have gained the user’s knowledge.
The policy also states that it “does not knowingly collect any data from youth under the age of 13,” in accordance with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA, U. S. law. The U. S. Department of Homeland Security imposes special restrictions on the knowledge collected from young people. The company’s software, however, is advertised for study rooms from kindergarten, which for many children begins around age 4.
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The survey indicated that it may not accurately determine what data about students would have been collected for real-world use. it would have been sent.
School districts and the public government that had the tools, Han wrote, “offloaded the actual prices of online education onto children, who were forced to pay for their learning with their fundamental privacy rights. “
The researchers said they discovered a number of trackers on websites that are not unusual for U. S. schools. UU. Se has shown that the ST Math website, a “visual education program” for kindergarten, elementary and secondary students, percentage of user knowledge with 19 third-party trackers, adding Facebook, Google, Twitter and Shopify e-commerce.
Kelsey Skaggs, a spokeswoman for the California-based MIND Research Institute, which runs ST Math, said the company does not “share any personally identifiable data in student records for targeted advertising or other business purposes” and does not use the same trackers on its student platform as it does on its homepage.
But the researchers said they discovered trackers only on the main ST Math site, but also on pages that offer math games for preschool and freshman.
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Google spokeswoman Christa Muldoon said the company is investigating investigators’ allegations and will take action if it discovers violations of its data privacy rules, which include banning personalized classified ads targeting children’s accounts. A spokesman for Facebook’s parent company Meta said it restricts how companies share young people’s data and how advertisers can target young people and teens.
The study comes as concerns mount about privacy dangers to the education generation industry. The Federal Trade Commission voted last week on a policy calling for stricter enforcement of COPPA, and Chairwoman Lina Khan argues that the law deserves to help “ensure that children can do their homework without having to surrender to industry surveillance practices. “
COPPA requires apps and downloads parental consent before collecting children’s data, but schools can give consent on your behalf if the data is for educational use.
In a statement, the FTC said it would try to “vigilantly enforce” the law’s provisions, adding prohibitions on requiring youth to provide more information and restrictions on the use of nonpublic information for marketing purposes. Companies that break the law, he said, may face fines and civil penalties.
Obviously, the team has a big impact. In Los Angeles, for example, more than 447,000 students use Schoology and 79,000 use ST Math. About 70,000 students in Miami-Dade County public schools use Schoology.
Both districts said they have taken steps to restrict privacy risks, and Los Angeles requires software corporations to submit a plan indicating what student data will look like, while Miami-Dade said it conducted a “thorough and thorough” evaluation procedure before bringing in Schoology last year. .
The researchers said most of the school districts they reviewed had not conducted any technical privacy tests before approving the training materials. Because the companies’ privacy policies concealed the extent of their oversight, the researchers said, district officials and parents did not know how the students’ knowledge would be collected or used.
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Some popular apps reviewed by the researchers didn’t track young people at all, proving that it’s imaginable to create an educational tool without sacrificing privacy. Apps like Math Kids and African Storybook didn’t show classified ads to young people, collected their credentials, accessed their cameras. , applied for more software permissions than they needed or sent their knowledge to ad tech companies, according to the analysis. They simply presented undeniable learning lessons, the kind that academics have relied on for decades.
Vivek Dave, a Texas parent whose corporate RV AppStudios makes Math Kids, said corporate rates for in-app purchases in certain word search games and puzzles designed for adults and then use that money to help create ad-free educational apps. Since launching a letter game seven years ago, the company has created 14 educational apps that have been installed 150 million times this year and are now available in more than 35 languages.
“If you have the hobby and just look to perceive them, you don’t want to do all that tracking point to connect with the kids,” she said. “My first beta testers were my children. And I didn’t want that for my kids, period.
The researchers argued that governments conduct data privacy audits of children’s apps, remove the most invasive ones, and advise teachers, parents and child consultants on the most productive way to avoid excessive collection or misuse of data.
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Companies, they said, should work to ensure that children’s information is treated differently from everyone else’s, including by being siloed away from ads and trackers. And lawmakers should encode these kinds of protections into regulation, so the companies aren’t allowed to police themselves.
Bill Fitzgerald, a privacy researcher and former high school teacher who was not involved in the study, sees apps’ tracking of students not only as a loss of privacy but as a lost opportunity to use the best of technology for their benefit. Instead of rehashing old ways to vacuum up user data, schools and software developers could have been pursuing fresher, more creative ideas to get children excited to learn.
“We have outsourced our collective imagination and our vision as to what innovation with technology could be to third-party product offerings that aren’t remotely close to the classroom and don’t have our best interests at heart,” Fitzgerald said.
“The conversation the industry wants us to have is: What’s the harm?” he added. “The right conversation, the ethical conversation is: What’s the need? Why does a fourth-grader need to be tracked by a third-party vendor to learn math?”
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Abby Rufer, a high school algebra teacher in Dallas, said she’s worked with a few of the tested apps and many others during a frustratingly complicated two years of remote education.
School districts felt compelled by the pandemic to temporarily update the classroom with online alternatives, he said, but most teachers didn’t have the time or technical skill to realize how much information they were absorbing.
“If the school tells you to use this app and you don’t know, it may just record your students’ information, that worries me greatly,” Rufer said.
Many of his academics are immigrants from Latin America or refugees from Afghanistan, he said, and some are already concerned that data on where they live and their families could be used against them.
“They’re expected to jump into a fully technological world,” he said, “and for many of them, that’s just another hurdle they need to overcome. “