After reading Julia Hengstler's primer on privacy on K-12 education in BC, I was brought back to the experiences I've had on the periphery of privacy impact assessments (PIAs) since working as a tech leader within my school district. Hengstler does a great job at explaining the various angles that teachers need to be aware of in order to protect student privacy while working within the boundaries of fair use and copyright.
I still have a few questions, more philosophical than empirical in nature, emerging from the reading.
1) Hengstler outlines the onus put upon teachers to "be diligent and make sure that no indication of personal and identifiable information is ‘hidden’ in data like embedded code or in a file name" (Hengstler, 5) even after removing student work. What can we do to ensure that educators understand the myriad ways that data can be accidentally embedded in various filetypes? I'm reminded of the EXIF data stored, sometimes without user knowledge, in almost every image taken by a DSLR or smartphone today. And this data is visible for all the world to see if the original image file is uploaded to a server. Interestingly, that EXIF viewer is based on the work of a now-retired Queens University computer programmer named Phil Harvey
2) What is the best approach to communicate the importance of data tenancy and privacy to families and parents? Given that anything stored online, even between a password-protected account, is "merely a cut-and-paste away from being public knowledge" (Hengstler, 5), what might school districts and individual educators do to gently and firmly reinforce the importance of not posting protected images publicly?
3) Finally, I'm curious to know about "e-incidents." Namely, are there are newer and more-established best practices around responding to dangerous/threatening/malicious online incidents being used by BC schools? The technology has crept even deeper into the fibre of our pedagogical approaches and there will always be new threats that might not respond to old solutions.
References
Chauhan, Sudhanshu, and Nutan Kumar Panda. “Chapter 7 - Metadata.” Hacking Web Intelligence, Elsevier Inc, 2015, pp. 133–46, doi:10.1016/B978-0-12-801867-5.00007-0.
Harvey, Phil. ExifTool by Phil Harvey, exiftool.org/. Accessed 18 July 2021.
Hengstler, Julia. “A K-12 Primer for British Columbia Teachers Posting Students’ Work Online.” 19 May 2013. etec.ctlt.ubc.ca/510wiki/images/2/2b/Primer_on_Posting_Minor_Students_Final.pdf. Accessed 15 July 2021.
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