Informed Consent for Digital Technologies - is it Achievable?

Schools use a lot of digital technology, but parents often don’t know what data is collected from students or how it’s used while long and complex terms make it hard for parents to truly give informed consent.

Digital platforms are used to enrol students, deliver learning content, and communicate with parents, and there is increasing use of facial recognition technologies and other ‘smart’ devices in classrooms.

Schools are responsible for educating students about using digital technologies, but they must protect students’ and teachers’ digital privacy.

Finding the right balance, while ensuring that parents are not overwhelmed by the information required to achieve informed consent, is increasingly difficult given that data practices are opaque and hidden from view.

Associate Professor Luci Pangrazio an expert in datafication at Deakin University says, "Teachers, parents and students feel they have a lack of control and understanding about how personal data is collected and used by third party edtech products.

"As schools rely on a range of commercial edtech platforms to carry out their daily activities they are simultaneously facilitating the collection of unprecedented levels of personal data.

"Our research has highlighted that teachers, parents and students feel they have a lack of control and understanding about how personal data is collected and used by third party edtech products.”

Terms and conditions are the main way in which the data practices of an edtech company are communicated to students and parents. Many of these are extremely long and use complicated language that are difficult for non-specialists to understand.

"What happens if parents do not consent to their children using a particular platform at school for learning? Do schools have the resources to provide them with an alternative task or digital platform?,” says Pangrazio.

"Without the ability to legitimately opt-out from using products, we must ask, is this informed consent?

"Children have a right to digital privacy, but they also have a right to access education - we need to make sure that one does not exclude the other.

"The question of how we balance these rights is brought into sharp relief when it comes to digital technologies and informed consent in schools."

Associate Professor Anna Bunn (Curtin University) adds, "Schools and education authorities are in a position of being able to drive changes to the data practices of the educational technology companies behind the products used in schools.

"We have researched the legal and policy frameworks that apply to Australian schools and education authorities, including requirements set out in Australian privacy laws."

"We argue that compliance with these laws and policies does not equate to best practice when it comes to protecting children’s digital privacy.

"This is because these laws are largely based on the ‘notice and consent’ model which assumes that privacy is sufficiently protected if people are given notice about what information is collected about them, and how it is used and (in some cases) are given the opportunity to consent - or not - to the collection or use of their personal information.”

Quite aside from the challenges in obtaining informed consent, parents (and students) often assume that the products have been thoroughly vetted by the schools and education authorities to determine that they sufficiently respect privacy and are otherwise ‘safe’ to use.

"Although most state education departments assess at least some of the digital products used in schools, our investigations failed to obtain clear information on the methodologies used during that assessment, and whether practices like tracking are even considered.

"It also became apparent during our research that different assessment processes may apply, depending on the product.

"Some products are required to undergo a thorough assessment conducted by independent expert third parties (for example, using the Safer Tech 4 Schools (ST4S) framework), whereas others only had to ‘self-assess’,” she says.

Stronger legal frameworks that do not rely solely on notice and consent but place greater onus on technology companies themselves to design privacy-respecting products for students are what is needed.