Gary Ruskin
Schools aren't market research factories

Last September, Web-filter company N2H2 Inc. and the Roper Starch Worldwide marketing firm came up with a clever scheme. They would plant a market research tool in school classrooms where children, by law, must spend their days. The new service would, in the company's words, help corporate advertisers "measure and analyze how U.S. kids K-12 use the Internet" and "guide their advertising and brand development strategies."

In other words, they would begin to convert the schools from learning centers to selling centers—extensions of the shopping malls. The company proudly tells of "currently tracking almost a billion in-school pageviews per month, offering an unprecedented in-depth analysis of 'teens and tweens' Web habits."

Here's how N2H2 does its schoolroom snooping. According to the Wall Street Journal, its Bess filtering system "knows where the students go on the Web and how long they spend there."

The child-tracking data, called Class Clicks, is aggregated, which means the Web-surfing of individual students cannot be identified. But for $15,000 a year, advertisers get monthly reports on where schoolchildren are going on the Internet, with Roper Starch's estimates of the races and ages of the students.

N2H2's sophisticated in-school spying and data-collection scheme helps marketers worm their way into kids' heads. N2H2 tells marketers that it "offers much greater drill-down capability" into the Web-browsing habits of children, who are an increasingly lucrative target for marketers.

N2H2 has sold its child-surveillance data to corporate marketers, such as BigChalk Inc., and the U.S. Department of Defense, which wants to improve its recruitment marketing.

Is this what the public schools and the compulsory schooling laws are for? Is this something that teachers feel proud of—to preside over a corporate market research factory that touts its "drill-down capability" into the psyches of the children entrusted to them?

When they send their children to school, parents trust that they will be safe from the creepy prying of self-interested adults. Allowing N2H2 software into the schools is a violation of that trust. This is especially true given that N2H2 boasts to marketers that its "data-collection mechanism is totally unobtrusive."

N2H2 is not the kind of corporation to invite into a school. To protect children from classroom snoops, it's best to remove N2H2's Web-filtering software from school computers. Or, at the very least, there ought to be full disclosure to parents of any and all uses of data gathered by the firm.

Ken Collins
Analysis helps educators

A Seattle-based Web filtering company, N2H2, does not agree with the selling of student data, or any person's data for that matter. What we do agree with is the analysis of "Web data" for the improvement of Internet experiences in schools.

Students, teachers and administrators in U.S. schools request billions of pages of Internet content each month. Records of this traffic--"Web data"--contain information about the sites visited. Internet servers, therefore, collect Web data, not human data. Billions of dollars are spent annually in the United States to provide Internet access, train teachers and produce Web content for education. Yet aside from the research published by N2H2, we know of no objective, quantifiable information on how the Web is being used. Analyses of Internet use provide useful feedback to the education community, the providers of education content, and the companies that post and maintain Web content and want to understand the aggregate interests of students.

Clearly, any analysis of Web usage requires that essential steps be taken to preserve user privacy, school time and the anonymity of the school districts where Web data are collected. Privacy is the easiest issue to address. N2H2 was built on protecting kids; we would never jeopardize their privacy. Logs of Internet use data ("Web data") as managed by N2H2 carry no personally identifying information (PII). It is impossible to identify any user, and the data are collected without affecting user time.

N2H2 policy states that only schools wanting to be in a statistical sample are in the sample. Further, records aren't attributed to the district where they originated, but associated with one of four U.S. regions. Such aggregation preserves anonymity. Participants are therefore aware that their usage information is being sampled and their identities are held as confidential information.

All of us in the education community want assurance our considerable technology investment is being put to best use by helping students find information better and faster. However, the technical infrastructure to collect, process and analyze tens of millions of Web usage records daily is considerable--requiring statisticians, developers, servers and software. The sale of analyses based on anonymously aggregated information to companies serving students and educators is one way of making these insights available to the education community at little or no cost; but there may be others. I invite your feedback and ideas.

American Federation of Teachers, AFL•CIO - 555 New Jersey Avenue, NW - Washington, DC 20001