With Tech Taking Over in Schools, Worries Rise

Technology companies are collecting a vast amount of data about students, touching every corner of their educational lives -- with few controls on how those details are used.

Now California is poised to become the first state to comprehensively restrict how such information is exploited by the growing education technology industry. Legislators in the state passed a law in August prohibiting educational sites, apps and cloud services used by schools from selling or disclosing personal information about students from kindergarten through high school; from using the children’s data to market to them; and from compiling dossiers on them.