Data mining at school poses threat to privacy and to children, forum hears

DETAILED personal information about Australian children is up for grabs each time they log in at school, and parents have no idea.

Not all fun and games ... children could be inadvertently revealing personal information

DETAILED personal information about thousands of Australian children is up for grabs each time they log in at school, a forum has heard, and parents have no idea.

The Australian Council of State School Organisations (ACSSO) says free web tools such as Google apps and Gmail are widely used in Australian schools, and the company has agreed not to show advertising to in-school users of their online offerings.

But Jeff Gould, president of US tech privacy advocacy body SafeGov, told a forum in Sydney that children’s online activities during school hours could still be scanned for personal data that could be used to deliver potentially troubling advertising to them beyond the school gates.

It’s known as data mining, Mr Gould said, and a joint SafeGov-ACSSO survey of 1000 Australian parents in 2013 showed most were clueless about the practice.

“The majority of parents, 54 per cent, basically don’t know anything,” he said.

Mr Gould said most parents were savvy enough to warn their children not to provide personal information, but data mining was more insidious.

A 13-year-old could log on at school, away from parents’ watchful eyes and send an email about a topless picture.

“And when they go outside school, or log into YouTube, or some other site that has nothing to do with Google but where Google is selling an ad on that site, they will get an ad for nude webcams or sexy singles or whatever,” Mr Gould said.

“Even if you’re disclosing nothing they can still figure out all these things about you.”

He told the inaugural Child Online Safety and Protection forum that schools needed to insist that tech giants agree not to use products designed for in-school use to gather data.

ACSSO president Peter Garrigan said as parents learned more about data mining, they overwhelmingly wanted the practice put to a stop.

“When we’re using this stuff in a school environment, turn off the data mining. Protect the kids,” he said.