Category: Privacy
Level: National
This article concerns policies that affect individuals and
families.
This article discusses the privacy issues developing with the
increased use of digital educational technologies.
My views:
The increasing reliance on technologies to serve the
functions that once pen and paper served is opening up a wide variety of
privacy concerns. I am continually grateful that I grew up in the land of
dial-up and AOL complete with parental controls. We had a healthy fear of the
internet which no longer exists. My fourteen-year-old sister posts videos of
herself playing the guitar on YouTube and takes endless selfies on Instagram and
I am grateful that I didn’t have the opportunity to do anything like that
(because I totally would have). My seventeen-year-old brother’s Facebook wall
makes me wiggle with embarrassment for the kid. My parents are okay with this.
These are the same parents who loved the parental controls on AOL because they
had the option to review every post I made on my favorite message board (which
was about knitting and crocheting, of course) before it went live.
So I am glad to see that there are advocacy groups who are
trying to ensure that children’s information is kept private. Adults can do
what they like. They should know better. But we need to protect the information
of children. Facebook is one thing, but the data collected on their scholastic
abilities, academic records, and the like is very sensitive and could be held
against them one day. So I’m all for ensuring that there is complete transparency
about what information is being collected and how that information is being
used and how long that information will be kept.
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