School districts have struggled for years to secure student data. K-12 districts manage copious amounts of student data that they are required to store for many years – without putting that data at risk. At the same time, the edtech vendors and management systems with whom they work have relied on antiquated rostering to provide data. As we all reconcile the need for edtech vendors to have certain information to function properly with the risk associated with traditional rostering, it’s exciting to be part of a revolutionary transformation in secure data exchange.
Download our white paper: Safeguarding Student Data Privacy
Beyond Traditional Rostering
Traditional rostering is an outdated method of sharing student data with the edtech vendors who work with a school. It amounts to copying and pasting all of the students’ data over to the edtech vendor’s database. This was considered an acceptable practice when districts were working with 10-20 vendors. Now, most schools work with thousands of vendors.
At the same time that the use of vendors proliferated, K-12 schools became one of the top targets of hackers. Cybercriminals realized what a rich goldmine of data schools stored and began targeting them with ransomware, DDOS attacks, and malware. Sometimes, even when the district agreed to pay the ransom and regained access to the data, the cybercriminals would still put it up for sale on the dark web.
Does Anyone Really Need All of that Information to Function?
Districts began to question whether or not the personally identifiable information (PII) was really necessary for the solution to function. And it became clear to districts that even if they did everything right, had strong cybersecurity, and plenty of proactive measures to prevent data breaches and protect student data, that the minute they shared that information with an outside vendor, it was only as secure as the vendor’s cybersecurity. Unfortunately, it wasn’t secure enough, and often, the data breaches that impacted student PII were a direct result of a breach in a third-party vendor.
Where Is My Data, Anyway?
As districts tried to get a handle on who had what student data, why they had it, and how to get in under control, 1EdTech began developing a method for vetting vendors to make sure they met a threshold for being safe to exchange data with. At the same time, our team began working on finding ways to ensure that our vendors could be fully functional in delivering their solutions to districts without needing access to any personally identifiable information.
Anonymized Data Is the Future of Secure Exchange
Anonymizing data allows K-12 school districts to share the data edtech vendors need to function without sharing the personally identifiable data that puts students at risk. GG4L’s School Passport is a data exchange platform that empowers edtech apps without sharing student data. It is easy to implement for both schools and edtech vendors.
Take Control of Student Data
School Passport offers users a Privacy Governance Console with PII monitoring dashboards and reports. The new Console is designed to control school district data sprawl, including Personally Identifiable Information (PII), across the education ecosystem of EdTech vendors. This is a revolutionary solution to the problems school districts struggle to manage.
GG4L advocates for open standards-based data integrations, governed PII-free data exchange, and strict data privacy compliance. Our School Passport Privacy Shield anonymizes personal identifiable information before it reaches your platform while still allowing for personalization, authentication, and communication with end-users, saving schools and vendors costs while ensuring better compliance.
Learn more: https://gg4l.com/reduce-data-privacy-security-overhead/
