PROBING PRIVACY POLICIES: Student data privacy is a hot button issue. And so EdWeek invited a professor at Princeton and Fordham University, along with a lawyer from the Electronic Privacy Information Center, to review the privacy policies of three of the most popular education providers: Edmodo, Khan Academy and Pearson. Here's what they found:
- Edmodo: Mandating encryption of student information is a positive development, but questions remain over how the company "collects, uses, and shares the 'metadata' generated by students."
- Khan Academy: "'They are essentially enabling third parties to gather unlimited information about users and disclaiming any responsibility for that,'"
- Pearson: Powerschool, a SIS used by about 4,500 districts "...raised the fewest concerns, in large part because students do not interact directly with the product." Also, many of the schools using it host the data on their own servers, not Pearson's.
