California’s Assembly today approved a first-in-the-nation online privacy measure, authored by Senate Leader Darrell Steinberg, which prohibits uses of student personal information for profit.
Senate Bill 1177, the Student Online Personal Information Protection Act (SOPIPA), passed unanimously on a 71-0 vote and heads back to the Senate for concurrence.
“My goal is to encourage technological innovation while protecting kids’ privacy and this bill doesn’t trade one goal for another, it achieves both,” said Steinberg (D-Sacramento). “The industry currently operates without restriction except for the ones that they unilaterally deem appropriate and that is unacceptable. Kids are in the classroom to learn.”
Companies providing online services to aide classroom teaching often require students to create accounts that capture contact data and personal academic information such as grades, disciplinary history, and chat-records.
In some instances, companies are mining data from schoolchildren beyond the needs of the classroom, including how many rooms a student had in their home and how many parents they lived with.
Some Apps marketed to teachers and kids could track a child’s physical location.
SOPIPA would end targeted advertising on K-12 websites, services and applications. It also prohibits operators from using any information gained from the use of their K-12 site to target advertising on any other site, service, or application.
The bill also prohibits creating a profile on a student, unless that profile is used for clear educational purposes. It also prevents companies from selling student data and limits disclosure of student personal information in common sense ways.
The only current restrictions on the use of student data by online educational technology products are contained in the privacy policies that they themselves deem appropriate.
Surveys of these privacy polices reveal provisions that remove a company’s liability for misuse of data, tell users that policies are subject to change at any time, and that companies are allowed to disclose data however they want.
This bill encourages continued innovation in education-technology and is supported by parents, administrators, school employees, scholastic publishers and teachers.
First-in-the-nation student privacy bill approved by California Assembly
- Lake County News reports
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