School districts across the country have embraced education technology (“EdTech”) as a means for enhancing school operations and classroom instruction. While the practice of collecting student data is not new – K-12 schools and institutions of higher education have been gathering and reporting test scores, grades, retention records, and the like for years – the means by which student information is collected, the types of information collected, and the entities that ultimately have access to this data have expanded dramatically.
At the same time, stories of misuse of student data and poor data security practices in K-12 schools, as well as large-scale breaches of universities’ data systems, are increasingly reported. Collection of student data by educational technologies is widespread, though there is not an extensive regulatory framework in place to complement this data collection. Federal student privacy law is outdated and state approaches are inconsistent. Furthermore, federal laws that can be used to reach EdTech directly are limited in their applicability. These gaps in the United States’ student privacy legal regime hinders industry innovation and school adoption of EdTech.
CDT believes realizing the full potential of EdTech in the classroom requires robust student privacy standards. Alex Bradshaw delves in to what needs to be accomplished so that student privacy can be greatly enhanced.
Coalition Urges Senate Not to Let Companies Waive Financial Regulations for AI
CDT joined AI Now Institute, American Civil Liberties Union, and several organizations dedicated to tech policy, consumer protection, and civil rights in a letter to Senate leadership and the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee opposing the “AI Innovation Labs” language in Sec. 10509 of the CLARITY Act.
Not All Guardrails Are Created Equal: Comparing Content Safety and Copyright Filtering
As courts and policymakers work through questions about chatbot liability, they should be wary of analogies that flatten meaningful technical differences. Copyright filtering and safety intervention share real challenges around ambiguity and evasion, but they diverge in what each control must assess, how each manifests over the course of a conversation, and how much can be verified from the outside.
Op-Ed: France’s Constitutional Council Ruling Tests the Limits of Social Media Bans
Read our analysis the legal and policy significance of the Constitutional Council’s decision on ongoing social media age restriction and age assurance debates ahead of the most-anticipated EU-wide approach on child online safety due by December 2026.
The brief explains that Section 230’s liability protections are essential to enable free expression online and they extend to the use of automated systems to engage to rank and order content as part of traditional publishing activities.
