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School librarians are champions of online learning. They select databases, use instructional software, and promote intellectual freedom including student access to the Internet. Propelled by the significant benefits of learning, engagement, and personalized instruction, many of their schools and districts have rapidly adopted online services without establishing standardized controls or protections for the massive amounts of student data being collected and shared. A 2013 study by Fordham Law School's Center on Law and Information Policy found that, while cloud services were deployed for wide-ranging functions in 95 percent of the six demographically and geographically diverse districts surveyed, they were "poorly understood, non-transparent, and weakly governed." The study noted "rampant gaps" in vendorschool contract documentation, an absence of policies governing privacy, and a failure to inform parents about their children's exposure to online services (Reidenberg et al. 2013, 5)The
situation is changing quickly. Some large districts now employ teams of in-house legal and policy experts who are charged with protecting student data and specifying measurable characteristics of "safe" online products. Most schools are in the process of developing privacy protocols and priorities. A strategic opportunity exists for school librarians to become leaders in shaping school privacy practices by guiding students, families, and faculty in wise and safe technology use while advocating for privacy rights. As advocates for thoughtful online learning, we must, at the very least, examine data confidentiality policies for the products we select and disseminate. More strategically, in our role as digital citizenship educators we must participate in our institutional decision-making process. We hold in our hands a fundamental responsibility to students as learners and citizens in a democracy guided by our profession's core values, which state that "Protecting user privacy and confidentiality is necessary for intellectual freedom and fundamental to the ethics and practice of librarianship" (ALA 2 OO^).
Do You Sign (and Read) the Contract?
To balance student privacy with educational objectives, a district or school must develop transparent guidelines and metrics to evaluate the policies and contracts of its online vendors. In support of these goals, the U.S. Department of Education's Privacy Technical Assistance Center provides resources that include "Warning signs and potential illegal practices to look out for" when using cloudbased services, recommendations for practices and policies to protect student...