Dive Brief:
- Tony Porterfield, a father of two and engineer at Cisco, is using his computer skills to uncover privacy flaws in digital education products such as Raz-Kids.com.
- Porterfield went to The New York Times after discovering that the online reading assessment product his son was supposed to use was not only unencrypted, but stored passwords in plain text — two security weaknesses that could allow unauthorized users to access private information.
- Previously, Porterfield had detailed security flaws in Edmodo to the newspaper.
Dive Insight:
In response to growing scrutiny over the security of new digital education options, a number of companies, from ClassDojo to Coursera, have re-assessed their privacy policies. In November, ClassDojo announced that it would dump student behavioral data after one year, starting in January. The new policy came in the wake of another New York Times article questioning the privacy of data it collected. Data security fears also led to the closure last year of cloud-based InBloom, following backlash from parents and advocacy groups nervous about its security measures.
In October, a number of big ed tech providers — including Microsoft, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and Amplify — signed a voluntary privacy pledge. Google, along with Apple and Pearson, were noticeably missing from the initial list of signatories. In January, Google finally caved and signed on, promising not to sell student data or use it to target ads. (Apple joined earlier in the month.)
