what happens to our student's personal information (also known as their
thoughts, and portions of the intellectual explorations that make up their life)
are sent to a large company. In this case, an engineer at Google was allegedly
fired for accessing the accounts of minors:
http://www.businessinsider.com/google-engineer-stalked-teens-spied-on-chats-2010-9
"In other cases involving teens of both sexes, Barksdale exhibited a similar
pattern of aggressively violating others' privacy, according to our source. He
accessed contact lists and chat transcripts, and in one case quoted from an IM
that he'd looked up behind the person's back. (He later apologized to one for
retrieving the information without her knowledge.) In another incident,
Barksdale unblocked himself from a Gtalk buddy list even though the teen in
question had taken steps to cut communications with the Google engineer."
So, as schools make decisions to outsource essential services to external
companies (aka the cloud), it's worth remembering that there are people working
around the clock to keep the cloud running. Most of these people do the right
thing all of the time, but for schools rolling these services out (and requiring
students to use them as part of their school work) what recourse would you have
if your student's privacy was violated? Is there even any guarantee that you
would be told?
At what point does convenience trump the ability to guarantee your students and
your parents that you have taken reasonable steps to ensure the privacy and
integrity of work done within your school?
[ For info on ISED-L see https://www.gds.org/podium/default.aspx?t=128874 ]
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