Don’t cry wolf about student privacy

When I ask my 3-year old, “why did the boy cry wolf?” he answered, “for attention of course.”  It’s a simple enough story with a basic message. Too bad the attorneys at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) didn’t learn that tale when they were youngsters. 

Last Tuesday, EFF cried wolf to get attention for its latest fundraising campaign, bombastically named, “Spying on Students.”   EFF filed a complaint with the FTC that is best described as fabricated.  And it’s our schools and students that will pay the price for EFF’s self-serving marketing move.  

{mosads}Hundreds of schools across the country use educational services like Google Apps for Education (GAFE) to improve teaching and ready our children for the 21^st century.  But after this unfounded assault by EFF, we might start seeing fewer tools for our children.

Earlier this year, Google and over 200 other businesses signed the Student Privacy Pledge in which they promised not to use student information collected through their student services for targeted advertising. (PrivacyPledge.org).  In their complaint, EFF claims that Google broke its promise but fails to support the claim with facts. 

We have admired EFF in the past for level-headed advocacy against federal surveillance and data collection.  But the EFF complaint against Google undermines EFF’s credibility. Worse, the complaint operates as a deterrent to businesses that are making best efforts to protect students’ personal information while delivering innovative educational technologies. 

The Privacy Pledge only applies to segments of a business engaged in designing and marketing educational services to students.  This makes sense – there’s a difference between services made for schools and a service a school may use.  We shouldn’t regulate Amazon the online seller in the same way we regulate Amazon the educational service.  Likewise, we shouldn’t regulate Google the search engine and Google the education service in the same way.  They are different services delivered in different ways.   

The Privacy Pledge, along with a dozen state laws, recognize this difference.  

This distinction between services is particularly important because when a student uses Google search or the Chrome Sync feature, Google is not acting as a school service provider.  Rather, Google is then acting as general operator providing services to general audiences.  But EFF chooses to ignore this distinction in furtherance of its fundraising campaign.  And not content to go after Chrome Sync, EFF says in their latest blog post that services with no advertisements and services clearly designed for general audiences, like Google Books and Google News, should be covered by the pledge.  

Likewise, EFF has the audacity to claim that Google violated the pledge when it used anonymized student data.  According to EFF, anonymous data is the same as the original data – before it was rendered anonymous. By definition, if something is anonymous, it can’t be linked to a person.  

Educational services can provide important aggregated and anonymized data for research, identifying educational concepts that work, improving products, and giving students better experiences. 

EFF’s complaint about data is especially confusing since the privacy community and EFF itself extol the virtues of anonymized and aggregated data to protect privacy and considered it a best practice. 

As you recall from the fable, when the boy cried wolf he pulled the townspeople away from their real jobs, and they eventually stopped heeding the boy’s cries. Here, EFF is wasting regulator resources on patently false claims and tarnishing Google’s good efforts, and limiting our students’ educational future – all in the name of attracting attention and getting paid for their work. 

Next time EFF cries wolf, maybe nobody will pay them any mind. 

Szabo is policy counsel for Netchoice.