Prominent Ed-Tech Players' Data-Privacy Policies Attract Scrutiny

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."