Cyber Security and Data Privacy Concerns for You and Your Kids In The Surveillance Culture

We have all heard about the recent data breaches and the impact they have on privacy, our elections and to our personal and financial well-being. Most of us navigate our day to day lives hardly realizing how many of the everyday tasks we perform are providing a digital trail that is being used to formulate a data-driven profile of who you are as a person, I call it Digital DNA. Our children are being born and reared in a society that now collects data on them as well. Today, information gathered and stored about us is traded and bought for money. Some entities want to know what we watch, eat, places we travel to, what we purchase and even what we are thinking of buying or contemplating in general. All of this data and more is captured even as we sit in the comfort of our family rooms to catch up with our favorite shows, listen to new music or surf the internet. 

Full disclosure, my firm specializes in machine based learning, data collection, correlation and analytics for cyber threat detection and data science purposes. We recently completed a project where we were asked to process and analyze Internet of Things (IoT) sensor data and correlate it with other data a major city in the U.S. was collecting and storing. The project opened my eyes to how much data we as humans generate. Heck if your pet has a chip and or has a GPS collar your dog or cat is adding to the volume of data being collected and tracked. All of this data we generate can live forever in a repository that could be vulnerable to a breach, or that is being used to tell others what the data says about us and what kind of humans we are. 

There are lots of best practice data on how to reduce the amount of tracking that we as adults are subjected to. We can buy or subscribe to tools that warn us when someone is peering into our data such as a credit report. Little guidance and attention, however, is given to how to protect our young ones from a breach of their privacy and the misuse of the digital DNA they are creating just by being modern day kids. 

The simple act of attending school, using tablets, cell phones, social media, and computers is generating a wealth of data on your child before they have even thought about their future. As kids, they, of course, deserve plenty of time to live in the now as they can leave worrying about the future to us older folks. But to this very point, we have to take the future into consideration and the impact of the Digital DNA profiles being collected and stored about our kids. This Digital DNA will be used for and against our children. We as adults must become active in monitoring the legislation at the local and federal levels that govern data privacy and the use of data that is collected about us but also our children.

A major U.S. City public education school system recently had a data breach discovered by a mother of a child in the school system. She found that personally identifiable data along with what could be considered sensitive data about what special needs children were receiving regarding services from the education system and other personal data was available on the internet. According to Verizon’s recent 2016 Data Breach Investigations Report, school systems were ranked sixth overall in the U.S. for the total number of reported “security incidents” last year. 

So what are we do about protecting our kid's future from Big Data, Predictive Analytics, and algorithms? How do we protect the most vulnerable ones as they grow and dream when Digital DNA possibly being the only factor used to determine if they get into their school of choice, get the job they want or even have the ability to travel and live as freely as they are entitled? Data-driven bias is already pervasive in our society, and as such we have to be more cautious about the forms we sign and the use of applications with terms of use that clearly if you read the fine print are telling you that you are forfeiting your privacy. 

You have a right to ask and verify that the data your school system keeps on your child is protected to the best of the school systems ability or more importantly the law. Read and understand the local laws that may govern the privacy and data rights of you and your child. In Oklahoma, the Student Data Accessibility, Transparency and Accountability Act of 2013 required the State Board of Education to publish data on the types of student data it collected. Many states have enacted student data privacy laws including the state of California, the state which is known for getting out ahead of many issues in 2014 enacted the Student Online Personal Information Protection Act also known as SOPIPA. It has many controls including prohibitions on using student data to target and market to them. The law also prohibited the sale of student data. In addition to data privacy protections, many states are requiring sound cyber security policies and controls to protect the data further and detect attempted breaches. While the new laws and policies are great, most states do not have budgets that allow for regular penetration testing and cyber value at risk type audits that could reveal security lapses. Budgets do not provide for cyber awareness training or supply chain security. 

An excellent resource that may help better understand the guidance school systems are being given is the recent publication, Data Security for Schools A Legal and Policy Guide for School Boards, published in January of 2017 by Christine N. Czuprynski, Reed Smith LLP. This guide can be found on the NSBA.ORG website. 

School systems, especially many public schools systems face the constant battle of having enough budget for even the most basic needs. The budget challenges can place cyber security at the end of the list of priorities and in turn expose you and your child to potential data breaches. Data records about your child typically also have data about you as the parent or guardian.

Like with everything in life, knowing your rights and staying aware and informed is important. Parents must stay actively engaged and cautious in our rapidly growing digital society. Our kids must also be taught to be careful about how much they share and what data they are plugging into social media applications and the types of images and data they are sharing. Their future could depend on it!