Student data privacy is cloudy today, clearer tomorrow

The education community operates in the “big data” world that promises big advantages, including individualized learning and the ability to track and document the needs, progress, and successes of individuals and groups. Most schools and districts rely on outside parties to process and store the data due to the prohibitive costs involved in developing their own platforms. Similarly, in health care, banking, consumer transactions and many public services, we hand over vast amounts of our personal information to online service providers for the convenience, speed, and even security they offer.

But seemingly frequent and certainly publicized data breaches and the federal government’s own online surveillance apparatus have given rise to increasing concerns over privacy. These days we want our information stored and processed for our own purposes; we do not want vendors to push ads to us without our permission nor to pass along our personal data to others.

For years, privacy advocates have articulated anxieties felt by the public and pushed back against intrusions on data privacy. Following Edward Snowden’s revelations regarding the scope of NSA surveillance practices in May 2013, privacy concerns played out in national media, and certain sectors of the public seemed more receptive to them. Policy discussions among education, privacy, government, and vendor groups at the national level became more urgent and frequent. From these discussions, bright-line rules began to emerge — new norms of student data privacy on which nearly all interested groups could agree.