Evaluating Privacy Policies, and Helping Others Do It Well
2 min read
In December, 2013, the Fordham Center on Law and Information Policy released a study on privacy and cloud computing in public schools within the US.
The study is a worthwhile read - I'm cleaning up my notes from several passes through it and will be putting them out in the form of a (long, messy) blog post later this week, but I wanted to highlight a "Document Coding Checklist" the authors created for the study, and included as Appendix B.
To highlight this work, I excerpted the checklist* from the study and included it here as an attachment (pdf download). The requirements defined in the checklist could be applied by any district, principal, or teacher when evaluating a piece of software or cloud-based service. A deep dive into the background knowledge required to accurately apply this checklist should be a one or two day professional development session. If the materials used for preparing and delivering this session were made available as open educational resources, under a Creative Commons license, it would be possible for a large number of people to get a much-needed crash course in the legalities of student privacy. This benefits teachers, students, parents, districts, policymakers - really, just about anyone affected by this issue.
Learning how to apply the checklist isn't a silver bullet for privacy issues, but the checklist provides a concrete starting point that people can use to discuss what privacy does or doesn't mean with regards to a specific service. The concept of privacy is complex; current approaches to privacy are convoluted and opaque; learning how to apply this checklist provides a means to address both of those issues.
* This checklist was created by the authors of the study, and is © 2013 by the Fordham Center on Law and Information Policy
