Margo Day, Vice-President, U.S. Education at Microsoft, writes:
We have been working diligently with our customers in the K12 community to help them understand and meet data privacy obligations as schools increasingly move to innovative cloud-based services. A recently published study by the Fordham Center for Law and Information Policy makes it clear that there is still much work to be done. The positive reactions to the study and its recommendations– from school leaders, parent groups, industry groups and policy makers— suggests there is a unique opportunity for these groups to work together to solve many of the issues highlighted in the study. In particular, the study demonstrates that our industry needs to step up and be a better partner with schools by being more transparent about how we handle their data and by agreeing to clear restrictions on how we will use their data, including agreeing not use such data for advertising, sales or marketing purposes.
Those common sense recommendations are just part of the improved transparency related to use of student and institution data that our industry owes its customers in the education community.
Read more on Microsoft in Education Blog.
h/t, The Journal