Jamaica Gleaner published an article on November 15th, 2020 on Remote Education Rife with Threats to Student Privacy.
Remote education has introduced various threats to student privacy through digital platforms where strangers can join classroom sessions and hide behind pseudo names and view live classrooms. Parents, students, and privacy advocates are seeking to hold schools and technology platforms accountable for such situations.
Key points:
- Students are enforcing measures on their devices to stop the use of invasive software that monitor device activity and usage data, which some schools and universities use to detect cheating. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), an organization advocating for digital privacy, wrote to the California Supreme Court on the matter pointing it out as spying.
- ProctorU, a platform that offers the monitoring software suffered a data breach in July 2020, that exposed usernames, email addresses, home addresses, phone numbers, and passwords of over 444,000 students. The leaked data was later posted on hacker forums on the internet for sale by cybercriminals.
- Students of Washington State University expressed concerns over the platform’s security practice and wrote over 1,900 petitions to have the software removed from their learning environment.
- To refrain from using these kinds of software to keep track of students, schools are being recommended to be flexible and allow students to do open book exams.
Reference: jamaica-gleaner.com
Contributed by: Jason Jacobs from Guyana. Jason is a member of the CCST Discord group from the G5 Cyber Security Foundation Ltd. Learn more about CCST (Caribbean Cyber Support Team) by visiting caribbeancst.org. CCST is a collaborative group on the Discord platform for Caribbean people in IT, from beginners to experts.