California’s two student privacy laws 2014
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Title | California’s two student privacy laws 2014 |
Content | UPDATED January 12, 2015: Student Privacy Matters, a parent advocacy group, points out weaknesses in the California student privacy laws and says that the President's proposed federal law is even weaker than the California state ones. Some of the weaknesses include:
The measure will prohibit K-12 websites, online services and apps from using students' personal information for targeted advertising or creating a commercial profile of any student and prohibit the selling of a student's information. The legislation will also require K-12 websites, services and apps to maintain reasonable security procedures for students' personal information, and to delete the information upon the school's request. ... Although other states recently enacted laws that regulate ed tech contracts or certain types of cloud-service vendors, California's new law is the only one that will cover a broad range of K-12 focused websites, services and apps, whether a contract exists or not. ... SOPIPA will permit innovation without encroaching on student privacy because it will allow the use of de-identified K-12 student info internally to improve educational products and services and to demonstrate the effectiveness of the products. It will also allow sharing of aggregated de-identified student info for development and improvement of educational sites, services, and apps. The key is that the data can still be used to improve educational products and services without being linked to specific students.In late September, 2014, California's Governor Brown signed into law AB 1584 and SB 1177, two laws that together form the strongest student privacy laws in the nation. Together, the laws mandate that Local Education Agencies (LEAs), such as school districts, must take proactive steps to protect student privacy. Under AB 1584, school districts that contract with third party providers of digital services (storage, software, hardware) relating to curriculum or student records will own and keep private the student records and the third party providers will not be able to use the information for marketing or other commercial purposes. Under SB1177, businesses serving primarily the K-12 market with schools or school-aged children as users cannot use personal information gathered or provided by the students in order to market goods or services to them. Among other provisions of the law they must observe, they must delete any information that a school requests them to. The big questions which is unanswered at this time (given that as of October 4, 2014, the ink is barely dry on the law): are testing companies considered "operators" as defined by SB1177? |
Excerpt | California has the strongest student data privacy laws in the nation. Should we model the federal Student Digital Privacy Act on them? Find out what's covered. |