Purpose of the Study
We would like to evaluate how education platforms handle students’ information and how that
information is protected.
Interested
in participating in the study?
How We Plan to Accomplish This
Partnership With the School
Your district will install a custom extension (program) on the Internet browsers of
school-provided laptops of participating students. Your district, or participating students,
may also be asked to enter some student information (e.g., names and addresses) into this
extension. Any such information, other than the name of the school district and the
student’s grade level, will be stored on the student’s laptop and will not be shared with
the researchers.
Mechanics of the Web Extension
Our extension will use the student provided information to check whether the
online education platforms we are studying share sensitive details about your students with
other entities. After this setup process, your students should use their school-provided
laptops as normal.
Data Privacy Concerns FAQ
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Will This Extension Collect Data on Every Website
Students Use?
No. The extension will only collect information – name, school district, grade,
phone number, geolocation, and website – when a student accesses specific online
education platforms listed in a whitelist. This whitelist will be defined in
collaboration with you, the school/district.
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Will the Researchers Have Access to Students’ Personal
Information Or Store Students’ Personal Information? No. By design, all
personal information about a student will be stored on the student’s device. There
is no technical mechanism for us to access that data. Moreover, since each student
retains their own personal information, we do not have any of their personal
information to store on our servers.
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What Information Does the Web Extension
Transmit? When a student is on an approved website the extension
records metadata such as URL, timestamp, and packet headers of HTTP requests to and
from the platform and other online services. The extension sends this metadata,
along with a pseudonymous student identifier, to the researchers.
Anticipated Outcome of the Study
We expect that the data collected by the web extension will help identify
relationships between education platforms and online tracking services. Thus, uncovering the
entities that may receive student data through content requests or embedding.