LearnerPrivacy.org

I look at the last 20 years of progress in educational technology and while have made great strides in improving interoperability, we have moved from having each campus 100% maintaining possession their learner's private data to the point where the there is no learner private data under the direct control of many universities. Private student data is often spread across 15 or more vendor systems. It is time to understand and explore the trade off of outsourcing student identity and private learning data to third party vendors. This is a problem that is 20 years in the making - it will take some time to get to a better place in the educational technology marketplace with respect to protecting learner privacy data. Music: Peacefully by E'S Jammy Jams

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In this fictional campfire story, we take a look at a community college English teacher and their students and how they get caught up in events happening in society. They end up being investigated by law enforcement out of an abundance of caution because their cell phone serial numbers were recorded by a Stingray device in a van parked near a protest march. The Law enforcement gets a subpoena to look at some of the students learning activity data out of an abundance of caution. Spoiler alert: nothing really bad happens to anyone in the story unless you have a principled concern regarding the loss of control / ownership of private student activity to third parties. Music: Strange Things at Night by Sir Cubworth

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In this episode, we look at the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Europe has a long history of thinking more deeply and formally about privacy than the US. We start by looking at the 1995 Data Protection Directive - which laid down a great set of principles long before the widespread use of the Internet or Cloud. Then in 2000 as a reaction to US world-scale applications like Google, Facebook, and Twitter, the EU developed the Safe Harbor principles, which US companies fought and eventually overturned in 2015. From the ashes of Safe Harbor, the Privacy Shield agreement emerged in 2016. The GDPR went into effect in 2018 with the intention of "getting it right". It turns out that unless a University wants to use GDPR to define a relationship with their educational technology vendors, it is pretty much ignored. Some cultures and some schools make good use of GDPR and others simply ignore it. This podcast is more about the Foibles and Flaws of GDPR. In an upcoming podcast we will flip and look at the regulation and where is is used and applied well. Music: Peacefully by E'S Jammy Jams

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