Nearly everything kids do these days is recorded and tracked. Technology companies can then mine this data about students from schools and social media sites, and turn around and use it to market products to students and to their families. And Maine, like most states, has few laws in place to protect them.
One exception is California, where lawmakers have passed sweeping legislation prohibiting educational websites, apps and cloud storage services from selling or disclosing personal information about school children. The legislation came in response to public testimony that technology companies were mining the mountains of data they handled for schools to market to students and their parents.
Maine Education Commissioner Jim Rier says, even though Maine collects a lot of information about schools, he's not aware that any similar mining is going on in Maine. "We are not collecting anything that would indicate to us which schools are using which software they may have made arrangements with and so forth,' Rier says. "Those are things we need to be more aggressive about and understand what is going on."
Still, the potential for such activity has some Maine lawmakers taking notice. Legislation similar to California’s was introduced late in this year’s session of the Maine Legislature, but was not acted on. Sen. Rebecca Millett, a Democrat from South Portland, co-chairs the Legislature’s Education Committee. She favors some limits on data collection, but not without considering the ramifications.
"We felt that a study pulling in the various aspects of those parts was a much more reflective way of instituting that kind of policy for the state of Maine," Millett says.
The study was not funded. Augusta Republican Rep. Matt Pouilot says it should have been, and he's confident the Legislature elected next month will deal with the issue. "I don’t think our kids should be buying a bag of Doritos at school and then be getting a piece of mail in their mailbox at home with a coupon for Doritos," Pouilot says. "I just don’t think that is OK."
Pouliot says lawmakers should be pro-active and not wait for the sort of activity documented in California to occur here. Retiring Democratic Rep. Bruce MacDonald of Boothbay, co-chair of the Education Committee, agrees. "Their personal information shouldn’t be used by anybody to data mine for any other purpose than school related stuff," Pouliot says.
Current Maine law only protects students from having to provide access to their personal social media accounts or their personal email accounts. Republican Sen. Brian Langley, of Ellsworth, says the need is great for further protections, and says any one going online should realize that.
"You just try to do any kind of search yourself on line and see those ads pop up in Pandora, they pop up in Google, and they pop up in every website you are in," Langley says. "And you know you are being tracked. That’s ok when you are an adult but not so when you are a kid."
There is a federal law that protects the actual school academic records of students, but privacy advocates across the country argue it does not protect the sort of data that can be gleaned by data mining companies from the websites a student visits.
Over the last year more than a hundred bills related to data mining were introduced in state legislatures and 30 measures were adopted setting some limits on data mining.
