Notes from the Privacy Presentation at the Portland EdTech Meetup

2 min read

Last night, I had the opportunity to present on privacy issues in educational technology to the Portland EdTech meetup. We had about 45 minutes to talk, which let us scratch the surface. We also had a good mix of vendors, people from higher ed, and people from K12. I'd love to see parents and (gasp) students in the mix at future events. I strongly prefer getting different stakeholders together, as all stakeholders benefit from hearing different perspectives and concerns.

The slides from the presentation are on Google Drive. The presentation is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license. Feel free to use any piece of it, and link to this post by way of attribution.

Below, I pulled out links to useful resources from the presentation.

A. Background Info

If You Could Only Read Two Things

• http://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/clip/2/
• https://tosdr.org

US Federal Landscape

• COPPA - https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/complying-coppa-frequently-asked-questions
• FERPA - http://familypolicy.ed.gov/ferpa-parents-students
• More on responses to FERPA complaints: https://epic.org/foia/ed/ferpa/
• PPRA - http://familypolicy.ed.gov/ppra
• Privacy Technical Assistance Center - http://ptac.ed.gov/

B. Implications of Thoughtless EdTech

• http://monsters.hackeducation.com/
• https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/grooming-students-for-a-lifetime-of-surveillance

C. Data Release and Implications

This is FAR FROM COMPREHENSIVE. Rather, these small examples show some of the complexities involved in deidentifying data, and how combining data sets can render some efforts at deidentification meaningless.

• http://techcrunch.com/2006/08/06/aol-proudly-releases-massive-amounts-of-user-search-data/
• https://medium.com/@vijayp/of-taxis-and-rainbows-f6bc289679a1
• http://research.neustar.biz/2014/09/15/riding-with-the-stars-passenger-privacy-in-the-nyc-taxicab-dataset/
• http://research.neustar.biz/2014/09/08/differential-privacy-the-basics/

D. Good Informational Resources

• http://edtechinfosec.org
• https://www.google.com/transparencyreport/saferemail/
• https://www.edsurge.com/n/2015-03-17-must-do-should-do-can-wait-to-do-kickboard-s-primer-on-edtech-privacy-and-security-best-practices
• https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Category:OWASP_Application_Security_Verification_Standard_Project

#privacy, #edtech, #presentations