Education Reform Bill Protects Children’s Privacy
The education reform bill signed into law by President Bush on Tuesday includes a number of provisions to protect the privacy of school children and their families.
Besides setting new educational standards for the nation’s schools receiving federal aid, the No Child Left Behind Act (HR-1), requires school districts to develop policies and procedures protecting the personal information of children and their families from obtained by commercial market research or testing companies.
These rules would also cover companies that provide the school district with information technology systems and/or Internet service.
Those companies often seek the ability to monitor a child’s online usage and a family’s buying habits, and use that data to market products and services to children and their families.
School districts will be required to provide annual notices to parents of children under 18 about any plans for commercial surveys, and give them an opportunity to review the survey and decide if they will allow their child to participate. Parents can also veto sharing of survey data with third parties for marketing purposes.
The law does, however, exempt surveys and other informational gathering techniques that are used to develop or provide educational products or services for colleges, book clubs, or other programs providing low-cost books or other related literary products and services.
The Direct Marketing Association “is pleased with those provisions because they provide parents with the ability to opt-out” said Jerry Cerasale, senior vice president, government affairs for the trade group. “We have something, that from our [direct marketing] perspective, is workable and falls easily to where our guidelines are.”
The privacy provisions were originally proposed by Sens. Christopher Dodd (D-CT) and Richard Shelby (R-AL) in the Student Privacy Protection Act (S-290), last year. They were incorporated into the education bill shortly before it won final passage in both the House and Senate just before the Christmas recess.
They introduced the measure after a study by the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, revealed that marketers and advertisers often target children without their parents
