Benjamin Herold

Growing public concern about student-data privacy is prompting fresh scrutiny of the ways technology vendors handle children's educational information -- and opening the gates for a flood of new questions and worries from advocates and school officials.

Take prominent education technology players Edmodo, Khan Academy, and Pearson. Each already has access to the information of tens of millions of US schoolchildren.

But a review of each group's privacy policies by two leading experts yielded concerns about the use of tracking and surveillance technologies that allow third parties to gather information on students; questions about the collection, use, and sharing of massive amounts of student "metadata"; and criticism of the growing burden on students and families, who experts maintain are being forced to navigate an ever-shifting maze of dense vendor policies on their own.

The concerns raised extend far beyond the direct serving of advertisements to students, which Joel Reidenberg, a law professor at Fordham University, described as "just one piece of the commercialization of children."

As part of a potentially explosive lawsuit making its way through federal court, giant online-services provider Google has acknowledged scanning the contents of millions of e-mail messages sent and received by student users of the company’s Apps for Education tool suite for schools.

In the suit, the company also faces accusations from plaintiffs that it went further, crossing a “creepy line” by using information gleaned from the scans to build “surreptitious” profiles of Apps for Education users that could be used for such purposes as targeted advertising.

The US District Court for the Northern District of California is currently hearing the complaint, which alleges that the data-mining practices behind Google’s Gmail electronic-messaging service violate federal and state wiretap and privacy laws.

Gmail is a key feature of Google Apps for Education, which has 30 million users worldwide and is provided by the company for free to thousands of educational institutions in the United States. A Google spokeswoman confirmed to Education Week that the company “scans and indexes” the emails of all Apps for Education users for a variety of purposes, including potential advertising, via automated processes that cannot be turned off -- even for Apps for Education customers who elect not to receive ads.

The Education Department’s recently issued guidance on student-data privacy appears to deem the alleged practices of Google Apps for Education as violating the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, or FERPA. Some experts, however, argue that the federal law is too antiquated to effectively address the complex privacy concerns raised by such high-tech data mining.