WASHINGTON -- The Obama administration briefly considered but ultimately decided against expanding a new student privacy bill beyond K-12 education, according to sources with knowledge of the drafting process. The resulting draft is a “missed opportunity” for the White House to address privacy in higher education, legal scholars say.
The Student Digital Privacy and Parental Rights Act of 2015, which will be introduced later this week by U.S. House Representatives Luke Messer and Jared S. Polis, seeks to limit how educational technology companies can use data they collect from students using their products. It builds on a proposal released by the White House in January, which in turn resembles a student privacy law passed in California last year.
The bill was supposed to be filed on Monday, but by the end of the day, lawmakers were “still working through some of the technical nuances of the bill,” a spokeswoman for Messer said in an email. Those involving in drafting the bill -- a joint effort between the White House and the two representatives -- were reportedly asking for outside input as recently as this past weekend, suggesting a difficult balancing act between concerns raised by privacy advocates and pressure from the private sector.
A recent draft of the bill attempts to strike a compromise, according to The New York Times. It would prevent companies from using educational data for marketing purposes, but allow data to be disclosed for student “employment opportunities.” While the bill would allow students and their parents to request to see and correct data -- and let schools request that those records be deleted -- it would also enable companies to change their privacy policies after schools sign a contract to use their services.
And as the name suggest, the bill has nothing to do with higher education. Although the White House made initial contact with at least one higher education organization earlier this year to discuss privacy issues, conversations about whether or not to expand the bill’s scope did not move past that stage.
The decision did not come as a surprise to legal scholars who have followed the administration’s recent privacy initiatives. When Obama in January outlined new privacy proposals, he focused on two groups: individual consumers and students under the age of 18. In his State of the Union address the following month, he called on Congress to “protect our children’s information.” Last year’s student data privacy pledge, which has drawn support from more than 100 education and technology companies and an endorsement from the White House, was also aimed at K-12 students.
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Mitchell L. Stevens, director of digital research and planning at Stanford University, said one policy that attempts to regulate both K-12 and postsecondary education would be a "bad idea."
"For adult learners, privacy is the wrong place to start," Stevens, associate professor of sociology, said. "I think privacy is the word we use to voice anxiety about the purposes of data when we don’t know what other language to invoke."
Stevens last year helped organize the Asilomar Convention for Learning Research in Higher Education, a gathering of faculty members and researchers to discuss appropriate use of data in higher education. The goal of the convention was to find new ethical guidelines for the glut of data produced at colleges and universities.
On Tuesday, Stevens also challenged the idea that students above the age of 18 should by default have full control of the data they produce.
"If you think about any empirical trace of instruction -- K-12 or postsecondary -- they’re really joint products," Stevens said. "The learner plays a role, the institution plays a role and the particular instructor plays a role. I think it’s fairly simplistic to default to the presumption that the data that are generated through that venture are primarily owned by one party."
Read the full story at Inside Higher Ed.
Mitchell Stevens is an associate professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education and the director of the Scandinavian Consortium for Organizational Research at Stanford.
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