Monthly Archives: February 2014

Common Sense Media Student Privacy Summit All About Self-Regulation

The biggest takeaway from Common Sense Media’s School Privacy Zone Summit was, in the words of U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, that “privacy needs to be a higher priority” in our schools.  According to Duncan, “privacy rules may be the seatbelts of this generation,” but getting these rules right in sensitive school environments will prove challenging.  As the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), one of the nation’s oldest privacy laws, turns forty this year, what seems to be apparent is that are schools lack both the resources and training necessary to even understand today’s digital privacy challenges surrounding student data.

Dr. Terry Grier, Superintendent of the Houston Independent School District, explains that his district of 225,000 students is getting training from a 5,000 student district in North Carolina.  The myriad of different school districts, varying sharply in wealth and size, has made it impossible for educators to define rules and expectations when it comes to how student data can be collected and used.

Moreover, while privacy advocates charge that schools have effectively relinquished control over their students’ information, several panelists noted that we haven’t yet decided who the ultimate custodian of student data even is.  One initial impulse might be to analogize education records to HIPAA health records, which belong to a patient, but Cameron Evans, CTO of education at Microsoft, suggested that it might be counterproductive to think of personalized education data as strictly comparable to individual health records.  On top of this dilemma, questions about how to communicate and inform parents have proven difficult to answer as educational technology shifts rapidly, resulting in a landscape that one state educational technology director described as the “wild wild west.”

There was wide recognition by both industry participants at the summit and policymakers that educational technology vendors need to establish best practices – and soon.  Secretary Duncan noted there was a lot of energy to address these issues, and that it was “in the best interest of commercial players to be self-policing.”  The implication was clear: begin establishing guidelines and helping schools now or face government regulation soon.

The Cost of Counterterrorism Review

My synopsis of Laura Donohue’s The Cost of Counterterrorism: Power, Politics, and Liberty is now up on the JustSecurity blog.  A couple of quick thoughts on the book:

First, it was impossible not to read in various Snowden revelations throughout the book.  It read very much like a prelude to all of the different programs and oversight problems we have learned about over the past year, which suggests that Snowden’s leaks really just confirmed what security critics were already surmising.  Further, considering the book was release right at the start of the smartphone explosion and the rise of “Big Data,” it’s fascinating to see how Professor Donohue talked about the capabilities of these technologies.

Second, my major criticism of the book is that it reads like a bunch of law review articles duct-taped together.  This may speak volumes for how legal scholarship is produced, or how many non-fiction books are collections that build upon a certain idea or original essay. Regardless, it was impossible not to notice how jarring portions of the book were.  Professor Donohue’s overall framework is to compare the national security regimes of the United States with the United Kingdom, and this leads to chapters that bounce from the Irish Troubles to American military policy in Iraq.  The comparison doesn’t always hold, and it some spots feels unwarranted.

Average Folks and Retailer Tracking

Yesterday evening, I found myself at the Mansion on O Street, whose eccentric interior filled with hidden doors, secret passages, and bizarrely themed rooms, seemed as good as any place to hold a privacy-related reception. The event marked the beta launch of my organization’s mobile location tracking opt-out.  Mobile location tracking, which is being implemented across the country by major retailers, fast food companies, malls, and the odd airport, first came to the public’s attention last year when Nordstrom informed its customers that it was tracking their phones in order to learn more about their shopping habits.

Today, the Federal Trade Commission hosted a morning workshop to discuss the issue, featuring representatives from analytics companies, consumer education firms, and privacy advocates. The workshop presented some of the same predictable arguments about lack of consumer awareness and ever-present worries about stifling innovation, but I think a contemporaneous conversation I had with a friend better highlights some of the privacy challenges mobile analytics presents.  Names removed to predict privacy, of course!

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