Student Privacy: Harm and Context

Abstract

This paper constructs a model of privacy assessment drawn from the context and harm approaches to privacy and applies it to the privacy issues raised by predictive modeling in education. This student privacy assessment involves assessing departures from existing norms of information flow embedded in the social context of education; assessing risks of harm to specific individuals or classes of individuals through unfair or unjustified discrimination; understanding the risk of adverse feedback effects on the aims and purposes of education itself; and the extent to which privacy issues mask more fundamental conflicts over educational values. The paper does not attempt to adjudicate these controversies but rather provides the conceptual and evaluative tools that might facilitate productive discussions.