Protecting Student Privacy Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. MARKEY. Madam President, we do not have to look any further than the recent data breaches at the Government Office of Personnel Management, Target, Home Depot, Sony, Neiman Marcus, and countless others to know there are pitfalls to the rush to store our personal, sensitive data online. And there is no information more personal and more sensitive than that of school-aged children.

The business of sifting through and storing the records of grade school and high school students is growing as fast as students are. By collecting personal information about students' test results and learning abilities, teachers may find better ways to educate their students. We can help improve their test scores, improve academic achievement, and prepare students for the future.

The increased use of data analysis of student performance holds promise for increasing student achievement, but at the same time there are perils from a privacy perspective. Putting the sensitive information of students in the hands of third parties and private sector companies raises a number of very serious questions about the privacy rights of parents and their children. The information being collected is about students as young as 5 years old.

As a nation, we have already decided that children require extra protection, and that is why in the House of Representatives I was the principal author of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA, which is what it is called. COPPA is the communications constitution for protecting children when they are online. I believe very deeply that parents, not private companies, should have the right to control information about their children, even when a child's data is in the hands of a private company.

We know that the pre-K through 12 educational software and digital content market is currently worth more than $8 billion. I will say that again. An $8 billion industry has now been built up around pre-K through 12 educational software, and nearly all of America's school districts rely on cloud services for a diverse range of functions that include data collection and analysis related to student performance.

As data analytics companies increasingly play a role in the education area, Congress must act to ensure that safeguards are in place for student data that is shared with third parties. Show-and-tell should be a classroom exercise with students, not with students' personal and sensitive information.

A child's educational record should not be sold as a product on the open market. That is why earlier this year I introduced the Protecting Student Privacy Act with Senators HATCH and KIRK. That is why today my colleague Senator Hatch and I are offering a bipartisan amendment which the Senators will be asked to vote on which will establish a commission to report to Congress on how we protect student privacy and parental rights in the digital age.

These recommendations the Senators will be voting on here today will include a number of things--No. 1, how to prevent marketers from using educational records to target students with advertisements.

The goal here is to help young scholars make the grade--not to have private sector companies make a sale. They should not be using the information they have in order to target young kids with products. That should be an issue for which we have a national policy.

No. 2, when should student information be deleted? Permanent records of children shouldn't be held permanently by private sector companies, but only by students and their parents.

No. 3 is how parents should be able to access and correct private information about their children. Just as there could be an erroneous charge on a credit report and that should not prevent someone from getting a loan, a false grade or a false bit of information on a report card shouldn't prevent a young person from getting into the college of their choice, and parents should have the ability to say they want that changed.

No. 4, how do we ensure that outside vendors, outside companies that handle and store this sensitive information put in place the strongest possible data security standards? This is a business. These companies are making money, saying: We will store this information so you don't have to build more physical storehouses. We will put this information up into the cloud. That will be a real cost savings for the school system. Well, how much security is that private sector company now going to build around the cloud with all of that information? Are they going to have the highest level of cyber security protections built in? Or are they just going to buy something that is dirt cheap and say they have security precautions but, like Target, like Sony, like the Office of Personnel Management, they will not have actually put in place the security protections which will ensure that children's most sensitive information is not compromised as it is being stored up in the cloud.

The reality is that our data is being increasingly compromised, and companies of all shapes and sizes must devote the resources necessary to protect that information. As it is stored in the cloud and as it is being subjected to malicious attacks, there must be a security system that can repel those attacks.

The amendment Senator Hatch and I bring to the floor here this afternoon at 5:30 brings together privacy experts, parents, school leaders, public advocates, and the technology industry in order to tackle how to best balance protecting students' personal information while promoting greater academic achievement. I urge my colleagues to support this bipartisan amendment.

There is a Dickensian quality to this digital world. It is the best of technology and the worst of technology simultaneously. It can be used to enable and ennoble. It can be used to degrade and debase. How we choose will only be determined by human beings and by those who represent them in the Senate. We have to ensure that we put in place policies that ensure we have the best use of these digital technologies while not having children and their parents be robbed of the private information that is so sensitive to the long term well-being of a child as they are developing.

That is what this amendment is all about here today. I urge an ``aye'' vote.

Madam President, I yield the floor.

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