Students and parents at Arrowhead High School are pushing back against a new web-filtering service the school is putting in place, calling it an invasion of privacy and an attempt to micromanage students’ lives online.
One of the chief gripes, for the kids at least, is that the parents now can opt to get a weekly accounting of all the websites they visit during the school day. The filters will run not only on all school-owned devices but also student-owned devices if they are connected to the school’s Wi-Fi.
But that, experts suggest, might be the least of their worries.
Security and privacy advocates have raised concerns about the capacity of such providers to collect vast amounts of information about students that may be stored for years and could be hacked or co-opted for unintended purposes if not adequately protected.
“Imagine, if we had the internet search histories of a young George Bush or Barack Obama,” said Bradley Shear, a Maryland attorney who has launched a national campaign urging schools to annually delete reams of student data, including internet browsing histories, all digital communications and the biometric data — finger and palm prints, for example — some schools are now using to manage their lunch lines, libraries and more.
The worries of the opposition are fairly misguided. All of that information is already being tracked, stored, and hacked.
Your statement is misleading. The content providers and the ISP would only see that requests come from the District. Only an internal network sniffer/router could log specific sites to specific students and only if the internal routers collect, identify, and use MAC addresses.
I do, however, think that there are MUCH bigger threats to our privacy.
What do you think, Alexa?
Well, let’s assume that there IS an internal sniffer and the little darlings’ searches are available.
I’m not quite as offhanded as Owen. Yes, there’s plenty of information already available and in use, for better or worse. But there’s no good reason to add to the pile, is there?
So delete after a decent period. That’s what we do with gun-purchase records, no?
Arrowhead’s data logging program is just another worthless use of our money; money that could be spent on less splashy stuff like building maintenance. I suppose Arrowhead could stop with the referendums and get back to educating students but I doubt that will happen.
Speaking from personal experience, school’s IT staff is usually the guy who figured out how to get email on his phone. At Hartford, I saw some the poorest IT decisions possible made by staff wasting thousands of dollars. Even students made fun of them. Trusting staff with this kind of collected data is just asking for trouble.
With so many wi-fi sources available, logging activity on one seems worthless. Schools should filter or block content on their own connection if only to protect themselves from legal action but not even the best can block all content.
Why don’t we have logging like this at the Legislature?
How many of the kids are using WiFi and a VPN?
How many are using cellular data instead of school PCs?