CA Bill: Data Mining Students

California has recently unanimously passed a monumental bill which protects students’ personal data. The senate bill would stop online services from selling or disclosing students’ data. This includes everything from students’ attendance records, health information, disciplinary action history, family history, biometrics, and their academic information. This is a huge step in the right direction for all students. Earlier this year Google was under fire for being caught data mining millions of students to sell their information to companies for advertisement purposes and who knows what else. Most of the students targeted in that incident were ones whose schools were using googles ‘Apps for Education’ tool suite. In the last two years, 30 other bills have been passed in other states however none of them were directly telling the technology vendors to straighten up their practices. This bill is so important because it’s the first of its kind to encompass so many of the data mining related problems in our country especially for children under 18. I really hope that this will be a continuing trend in our country over the next few years, preferably sooner rather than later. The end goal in my own opinion is for our fourth amendment rights to no longer be violated for profit. Unfortunately most people don’t understand to what extent this is being done to every single person in this country, whether you like it or not.

Sources:
Naked Security
The National Law Review