Guest AuthorStudent privacy has been much in the news lately, given the revelations that Pearson, creator of the new PARCC tests and one time creator of the FCAT, is monitoring social media to look for breaches of test security. (PARCC is the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers.)
Not surprisingly, there’s a bill in Congress that follows closely the Student Privacy Pledge advocated by the tech industry. Companies that sign the pledge promise to allow parents to see and correct student information, be transparent about how data is collected and used and not to sell student data. Critics say the law is silent on how student information is used within each company and does not allow parents any say about what information is collected and kept.
The Florida bill signed into law a year ago requires school districts to store parent and student information like Social Security numbers securely and allows parents to access and correct the data as well as restrict access to certain types of information. This statute builds on FERPA (Family Education Rights and Privacy Act), a 1974 federal law that applies only to Title One schools. With development of the Internet, there have been numerous lawsuits accusing the agency of inappropriate release of information to third parties.
One thing we can say is that whatever laws are passed, whether on the state level or federal, will need to be constantly clarified and updated. The digital world moves at lightning speed but the legislative world moves at a snail’s pace.
None of these bills addresses voluntary underage participation in social media and data mining of this information by big companies. Posting on social media brings an implied permission for the reader to intrude on another’s private life. Facebook, Twitter, Bing and Google have budgets larger than many countries because they are selling the data that streams through their collective fingers. Facebook sends me T-shirt ads for cat lovers and art teachers because they know who I am. Google stacks commercial sites at the top of my searches. All companies are data mining, whether formally or informally, and using what they learn to shape their products and their marketing strategies.
Every time we visit a website, it collects enough data to identify us if we return. If we create a profile on a website, we give the site control over our data. Apps like Mapquest, TripAdvisor and GasBuddy know where we are. Even services like Snapchat and Yik Yak that promise to be ephemeral and/or anonymous pose risks.
I would like to send a wakeup call to my social media obsessed students. Everything we post on social media is being tracked. Picture files have information about the time and place each picture was taken, and this can be uncovered by a hacker. Texts and cell phone conversations go up to the satellite and come back down. They can be intercepted and read or recorded at any point in the process. Wifi is no better and is even easier to get into.
Snapchat claims to be ephemeral, but there is an arms race between the company and users. Snapchat’s users quickly learned when it first started to use screen shots to save pictures on their phones or computers. Snapchat disabled that feature. Now there is an app that will record messages and pictures from Snapchat. I predict that when the service learns how to block that app, within a short time, there will be a new app that does the same job.
Everything posted on social media leaves a trace. Even if a user deletes a tweet or post, someone very likely has saved a copy or knows how to go into a cache and find an undeleted version. Yik Yak can claim to be anonymous, but often the poster will unwittingly include personal information that will allow readers to trace the post back to the source. People have posted racist, sexist or homophobic comments on Twitter only to find themselves tracked down, pilloried in social media and even fired from their job. Nowadays many employers request the password to an applicant’s Facebook page. This is clearly an invasion of privacy, but if the prospective workers want the job badly enough, they will turn it over.
Testing companies also are naïve about social media. They need to understand that they cannot expect to detect and monitor every single communication related to their tests. First, there is the deep web, not just the 10th or 11th page on a Google search that hardly anyone bothers to visit but maybe the 200th or 10,000th page. There is so much data out there that it is impossible to catch everything. Data in the form of language is fairly easy to mine, but anything posted as a picture file is hard to aggregate, disaggregate and track. So if a user takes a picture of a hand-written note and sends it by Instagram to a few select friends, it would be almost impossible to find.
AIR (American Institutes for Research), Pearson and the College Board need to recognize that once a test is given, the information is no longer secure. Pearson is famously very secretive and refuses to make old tests available to the public. They can threaten teachers and staff with losing their jobs and certification. They can even go after more open posts on sites like Twitter, but they need to face the fact that there are tech-savvy teenagers sharing information right now across multiple platforms.
Currently every student in Florida has to sign a pledge that they will not talk about the test with anyone. The glaring loophole in this promise is that the vast majority of students are underage and cannot sign a binding contract. One solution might be to have the parents sign the pledge, but that would be difficult to get 100 percent returned. I have a form I send home to parents for permission to post student work. I never get 100 percent returned, usually between 75 percent and 90 percent. This could become a means for parents who don’t agree with the test to opt out by refusing to sign the form.
Everyone needs to realize that privacy as it existed 40 years ago when FERPA was created is dead. The best we can do is be aware of what is being collected. Parents need to monitor how their children use social media and exercise their rights to see what schools and companies have collected on their children.
Catherine Shore Martinez is a National Board Certified teacher at Pahokee Middle Senior High School in Palm Beach County. Column courtesy of Context Florida.
