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The Senate passed the Kids Online Safety and Privacy Act (KOSPA) this week with an overwhelming vote of 91-3. KOSPA combines two bills that propose an array of legal standards for online companies when their users are under age 17. The bill will move to the House for further consideration this fall.
The current text of KOSPA has garnered mixed reactions from leaders of major education organizations. The bill would ban online companies from collecting personal information on students younger than 17. It would also require online platforms to create a point of contact for schools to report potential harm to minors. However, KOSPA does not require verification of district accounts on social media. The bill also contains several provisions that could inadvertently affect the use of ed-tech tools in schools.
Title I of KOSPA is the Kids Online Safety Act, which would give parents control over privacy and account settings, allow minors to control personalized recommendation systems, and enable parents and students to set screen-time limits. These provisions may be helpful at home but not at school, said Amelia Vance, chief counsel for the School Superintendents Association (AASA) Student and Child Privacy Center.
“This all comes from a really good place, but this is a bill that was thought of to protect kids at home — it wasn’t really thought of in the context of schools,” Vance said. “This could definitely create some messy barriers.”
For example, under KOSPA, parents could turn off the privacy safeguards set up by ed-tech vendors. Parents or students could limit screen time on a school math app to zero, and students could turn off the recommendation systems that drive adaptive testing and personalized learning.
“So again, you just have some unintended consequences from thinking of kids just sort of at home as opposed to what might be going on at school,” Vance said. “How do we make it so that we put these protections in place, but we also respect the school context?”
To answer that question, AASA and 10 other education organizations, including the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN), the Council of the Great City Schools and the National School Boards Association, signed a letter to the Senate proposing school-use exemptions to these parts of KOSPA.
The school-use exemptions were not included in the version of the bill approved by the Senate this week, but Vance said she is hopeful the House will “incorporate these very simple common-sense changes” when it considers the bill this fall.
Title II of KOSPA is the Children and Teen’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA 2.0), an update to the 1998 Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. According to a news release from the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, COPPA 2.0 “bans online companies from collecting personal information from users under 17 years old without their consent.” Vance said this will benefit schools overall in the protection of students.
“In addition to being a pretty broad law that applies to a lot, it also has pretty strong teeth — the fines can be enormous,” she said. “And so there really is an incentive for those companies that need to follow it to be proactive and make sure they are being privacy protective with kids’ information.”
Another piece of KOSPA requires online platforms to provide a direct electronic point of contact for schools to report student safety concerns, such as online harassment or posts about suicide. However, the bill does not address the issue of school district impersonation on social media platforms. Making this part of KOSPA would be a big help to schools, said Carla Wade, senior director of external relations at CoSN.
“We want to have Congress require that social media platforms offer schools an easy pathway for verification so that they can’t be impersonated. That’s a huge problem for our schools,” Wade said. “This can’t be an extenuated process to pull down a fraudulent account. It needs to be done quickly and easily, not only because of the burden on school districts, but more importantly because of the harm it does to students and staff.”
Both Wade and Vance said the House is expected to add its own language to KOSPA when members return from summer recess on Sept. 9. From there, it will go back to the Senate for final approval before it can be sent to the president’s desk.
“I think we’ll get a good sign within a week of the House coming back of whether or not this is going to come together in a way that would actually pass before the election,” Vance said. “The only thing we know for sure is that the House won’t pass the exact version the Senate passed.”
