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Task 1

Working on the text

Do the following tasks, writing coherent texts. Use your own words as far as appropriate.
(28 BE)
1.
Summarize the article.
2.
Analyze how the author presents the topic.

Writing

Choose one of the following tasks:
(32 BE)
3.1
“[...] Montgomery county gives students laptops and has hired tech companies to track students' activities on those computers, including monitoring what they search for and what websites they visit.” (l.13-15)
Using the quotation from the text as a starting point, discuss the benefits and risks of digitalization at schools.
or
3.2
Keeping secrets has become increasingly difficult in today's world.
Comment on this statement.

“Why parents in a school district near the CIA are forcing tech companies to erase kids' data”

1
Parents at a public school district in Maryland have won a major victory for student privacy:
2
tech companies that work with the school district now have to purge the data they have collected
3
on students once a year. Experts say the district's "Data Deletion Week" may be the first of its
4
kind in the country.
5
It's not exactly an accident that schools in Montgomery county, in the suburbs of Washington
6
DC, are leading the way on privacy protections for kids. The large school district is near the
7
headquarters of the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency. It's a place
8
where many federal employees, lawyers and security experts send their own kids.
9
As digital surveillance of American students expands rapidly in schools across the country,
10
sparking new debates over trade-offs between privacy and safety, Montgomery county is a
11
revealing example of what protections some of the nation's most well-informed, privacy-savvy
12
parents think their children need.
13
Like thousands of American public school districts, Montgomery county gives students laptops
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and has hired tech companies to track students' activities on those computers, including
15
monitoring what they search for and what websites they visit.
16
This digital surveillance - a booming industry - is marketed as a way to keep kids safe from
17
school shootings and self-harm. lt also generates detailed data on individual children.
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Montgomery county parents fear that data might someday be used against their kids.
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This is not a distant worry. Teenagers are already facing consequences for private behavior
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online. [ ... ]
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Parents across the US told the Guardian that they were afraid about having detailed educational
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data about their children - like how quickly they complete their homework - being fed into the
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enormous black box of the data mining industry. Companies have long gathered, traded and
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sold vast quantities of data on individuals' online behavior and consumer purchases,
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information that is also combined with public voter data and used to create targeted political
26
advertising. Individuals have little way to know how their data is shared from one company to
27
another, and no power to prevent giant, frequent data breaches.
28
By requiring tech companies to delete data they collect on schoolchildren once a year, parent
29
activists in Montgomery county said they hope to shield kids from being held accountable in
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adulthood for youthful mistakes, as well as to guard them from exploitation by what one parent
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termed "the student data surveillance industrial complex". [ ... ]
32
The district demands more than a vague assurance from tech companies that the data has been
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erased: "They send us a certification that officially confirms legally that the information has
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been deleted from their servers,"Cevenini said.
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GoGuardian has already submitted its formal certification; the district is still waiting for formal
36
certification from Google, Cevenini said.
37
One of the parent leaders of the Data Deletion Week campaign was Bradley Shear, an attorney
38
who specializes in social media and privacy policy. Shear said he was attending a conference
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for privacy law scholars in Washington a few years ago when he received a phone call from his
40
son's teacher informing him that the second-grader was in trouble for having Googled the song
41
Fuck You, by CeeLo Green, on his school laptop.
42
Shear said he was certain that his son had not searched for the song on purpose, and that the
43
auto-complete function in Google search was to blame. But the incident prompted him to try to
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make sure that GoGuardian, which the school pays to monitor students' search and website
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visits, would delete the data it had collected on his son.
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The response he eventually got from the tech company in 2017, a pledge to delete or "deidentify"
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his child's data, was not enough for Shear. As a policy expert who had worked to pass
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social media privacy laws in states across the country, Shear said, he knew that "de-identified"
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data could usually be re-identified again.
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He decided to push for district-wide changes in how GoGuardian and other companies retain
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children's data, including working to educate and organize other parents to push the school
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district to change its policies and require tech companies to regularly delete student data.
53
“You don't need to keep for ever what these kids are searching for online, or what's in their
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Gchats,“ Shear said.
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"Even when data is supposed to only be used for one purpose, it will be used for other purposes,"
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he added. "We don't want any of this stuff hanging out and then being used against kids when
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they apply to college." Shear met with district officials to discuss his concerns, and he soon found
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allies on the district's active parent-teacher association, which has an entire committee dedicated
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to "safe technology" issues.
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One parent on the safe tech committee, who asked that her name not be used to protect her son's
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privacy, had an experience similar to Shear's.
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She said her then eight-year-old son typed in "save the land" when doing a book report on
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conservation, "and up came the Ku Klux Klan ... 'Save the land, join the Klan.' He didn't know
63
what that was," she said.
64
When she talked to the teacher and suggested wiping the search from her son's browser history,
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the teacher said that would not be possible, the parent recalled.
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If anyone was building a digital footprint of her son's behavior, the parent said, there would
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now be a visit to a Klan site in it.
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"Kids are curious. They're just going to plug in some key words thinking that they're funny,
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and it just might stick," she said.
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I want my child to do whatever he wants to do with his career and his life," said Ellen Zavian,
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a George Washington University law professor and another of the parent advocates. [ ... ]
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"My goal is to have my son have the smallest [data] footprint to give him the largest opportunity," she said.
Beckett, Lois: Why parents in a school district near the CIA are forcing tech companies to erase kids' data.
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/dec/05/schools-monitor-students-online-activity (05.12.2019)

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