Speakers: Autumm Caines, Erin Rose Glass

The growing use of digital tools for education has triggered new concerns about the importance and feasibility of protecting student privacy. As is well known, digital tools collect, store, expose, and sometimes even profit off of student data in ways whose ethical and practical implications are often not fully considered or understood. Student privacy, however, is not a new or unique concern: it has been protected since the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 (FERPA) and intersects with growing concerns about protecting general user privacy in a tech industry motivated by surveillance capitalism (Zuboff 2019). How those different understandings of privacy come into play in today’s classroom, and whether they provide a strong enough framework for protecting student privacy, has not yet been fully explored. This interactive panel will explore the different significances and stakes of student privacy in the age of surveillance capitalism, and consider the affordances and limits of different technological, institutional, and pedagogical responses. Our panel will start with a presentation on the different understandings of “student privacy,” followed by two brief motivating talks: Autumm will focus on digital literacy toward student data ownership through critical engagement with projects such as Domain of One’s Own. Erin will offer a short analysis of the limitations of FERPA, especially with respect to Google products, and infrastructural protocols that make certain types of privacy protection very difficult even when using open source alternatives. The session will conclude with a collaborative writing session for creating text that can be copy/pasted onto syllabuses that raises student awareness about the complex issues related to their privacy when using digital tools.