Schools Wrestle With Privacy of Digital Data Collected on Students

Experts are concerned that digital data stored on distant vendor servers could later harm students who make mistakes on social media, or with widely used classroom apps.

Many school districts have scores of vendors that gather information via apps or online curricula, and revisions to the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act made parental consent no longer obligatory for school officials to share personal data with third-party vendors.

Maryland attorney Bradley Shear successfully lobbied Montgomery County Public Schools to implement a deletion protocol, so student data histories can be purged from Google, Apple, and GoGuardian servers. Shear's efforts led to an annual "Data Deletion Week" for that district, which the lawyer hopes could be adopted nationally.

From The Wall Street Journal 
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