Posts Tagged → legal

Can Education Keep Up With Tech World?

In an opinion piece for CNN, a “security technologist” asks “Can laws keep up with tech world?’. If you accept Betteridge’s law of headlines, the answer of course is no. But the relationship between the legal and technical is certainly far more complex than a binary response anyway.

Traditionally, new technologies were adopted slowly over decades. There was time for people to figure them out, and for their social repercussions to percolate through society. Legislatures and courts had time to figure out rules for these technologies and how they should integrate into the existing legal structures.

That’s just not true anymore. A new technology can go from zero to a hundred million users in a year or less. That’s just too fast for the political or legal process. By the time they’re asked to make rules, these technologies are well-entrenched in society.

Much of what he’s saying, including the original question, could very well apply to technology in education. In their time movies, radio, television, video tape, even computers were new technologies that had some impact on the classroom. But these technologies worked their way into society over years and decades, giving schools plenty of time to figure out how each innovation fit into their instructional model.

As with the legal structures, that’s just not true anymore in education.

In less than a decade, we find large numbers of students (if not a majority of them) coming to school with powerful communications devices in their pockets, devices can connect them to most of the world’s knowledge, both the good and bad. Those new technologies that rapidly go from “zero to a hundred million users” are often through the classroom door before teachers have even heard of them.

As much as school administrators would like, the solution is not to slow down the entry of technology into the learning process so we can carefully design new research, craft new policies, and edit curriculum. Educators do not have that kind of control anymore. It’s also far too late to try banning the tech from the learning process.

Even if we did have the time, there’s really no way force these new technologies to fit into our traditional instructional model, not even with special “walled garden”, “EDU” versions. That teacher-controlled delivery of information, paired with curriculum-approved context doesn’t work anymore, no matter how hard we work to graft technology into it. Our traditional system is not one that will prepare students for a world “moving too fast for the political and legal process”.

So, regardless of Betteridge’s law, the answer to the title question of this post is certainly no. Which means we need reconsider what part schools play in that current tech world, and how we can help students learn to successfully adapt in the world of whatever comes next.

Forgetting History

In May of 2014 the European Court of Justice, which is roughly the equivalent of a supreme court for the countries of the European Union, decided that their privacy laws provided citizens with a new right: the right to be forgotten.

Specifically, the court ordered Google to remove from search results that are “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant, or excessive in relation to the purposes for which they were processed and in the light of the time that has elapsed” in European countries. The order was later extended to include Bing and other search engines.

It’s been interesting to watch the whole “right to be forgotten” story unfold. Now, a year and a half later, there are still far more questions than answers about this concept and how it is applied, not only in Europe but world wide. Questions that include:

Why didn’t the court require that the original material be taken down? From what I’ve read it’s because the justices felt existing libel and slander laws (which are much tougher in the EU than the US) covered that territory so this ruling applies only to search engine listings. Think of it as removing the card from the library catalog but leaving the offending book on the shelf (an analogy for all of us who remember “card” catalogs :-)

Who decides what’s “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant”? Good question about very vague criteria. Turns out the court left that up to Google and the other search providers to determine. Anyone in the affected European Union countries can submit a request and then… someone at Google decides. And they have received a lot of requests.

Since the policy was put into place last May, Google reports that it’s received 348,085 total requests to remove links, covering a total of 1,234,092 URLs. Around 42 percent of the links (excluding cases that are still pending) ended up being removed.

Are stories written about the “right to be forgotten” process, ones that include links to material removed from search results, also required to be removed? Evidentally, yes. At least according to the UK “data protection watchdog.” A news site called Tech Dirt has been testing the process by writing a new post linking back to their removed posts every time they are notified of the removal. So far, they seem to be winning and many of the more traditional news outlets are posting their own lists of “forgotten” articles.

Does the “right to be forgotten” extend outside the European Union? Well, it seems the French government thinks it should. Last summer they ordered that the concept be applied everywhere in the world Google did business, with threats of heavy fines for non-compliance. Needless to say that didn’t go over well outside of France and, as far as I can determine, Google has not complied with the order.

There are, of course, many more questions about a “right to be forgotten”, along with the broader topic of privacy in a digital age, with very little that will be settled soon.

However, it’s a very interesting subject, one that anyone who lives and works on the web should be paying attention to. More ranting to come in this little corner very soon. You have been warned. :-)

Criminalizing Photography

For anyone who carries a camera (and in the US that’s probably most people), a short interview with the general counsel for the National Press Photographers Association.

While the discussion is largely about people who make a living from their pictures and his examples revolve around confrontations with police, much of this advice applies to all photographers, regardless of the size of the camera or the reason they want to take pictures.

It boils down to, “If you’re out in public, you can take pictures.”

Read the whole thing and stand up for your rights.

We’re All Criminals

Earlier this week, as I was discussing my lawbreaking activities, Dean addressed a similar subject, writing about how all of us, especially in education, are being driven to a life of crime by bad laws.

He’s talking about the personal privacy laws, including those directed at specifically at children, that don’t fit with the current reality of the web.

We live in the cloud and we don’t particularly care where the cloud is located. Many would argue we should care. Many see privacy concerns being ignored by people like me. I don’t think that’s true. This once again is tied closely to helping our students and teachers develop and understand their online identities. I understand the intent of the law is to protect our information and privacy and schools do have an obligation to protect. However the challenge is that these laws completely miss the affordances and opportunities that exist for students as they publish and share online.

Although Dean is commenting on Canadian policies, things are very similar here in the US.

We spend way too much time and energy in the futile pursuit of trying to shield students from exposure on the web and miss many great opportunities to help them learn to establish and maintain their online identities.

Instead of blocking Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and the new school filtering favorite around here Pinterest, teach kids (and more than a few adults) how to read the terms of service and what all those privacy settings mean.

As an alternative to yet another traditional term paper, let’s work on effective ways of crafting media to share ideas with an international audience. Or even start with something as seemingly simple as writing an effective blog comment.

The whole alphabet soup of laws (COPPA, CIPPA, FIPPA*), not to mention our current attitudes, need to be revised. There are better ways to use our instructional and legal efforts than in a losing battle to keep kids and their thoughts (good and bad) behind an increasingly porous wall.

* That last one is Canadian. Ask Dean. :-)

Testing The Law

The past week or so, I’ve been following an odd legal issue in the UK involving a football star who was caught having an affair with a television personality. But the tabloid details are the least interesting part of this story.

It seems the lawyers for the footballer convinced a magistrate to issue something called a “super-injunction“, a legal order that forbids anyone from publishing anything “confidential or private” about the applicant or the case, and effectively banning “reporting that the injunction itself even exists”.

That worked fine for the traditional news outlets but fell apart when someone posted his identity on Twitter.  Of course, the name was quickly re-tweeted hundreds of times and the British legal system, not to mention their media outlets, was outraged.

Websites such as Twitter have put a huge strain on the ability of the courts to enforce gagging orders and it has been widely assumed there is no legal redress against them.

The Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt said this week that digital media had made an ass of the law and it was hard to enforce injunctions against Twitter because it was incorporated in the United States.

Now it seems the law is about to be tested.

So, should the law (British or otherwise) consider Twitter to be a “publisher”, similar to the BBC or the Sun newspaper, and subject to a gag order from a court?

Is Twitter responsible for monitoring – and censoring – legally questionable material posted by it’s users?

This is not the first time that Twitter, Facebook, and other social media sites have been the focus of similar privacy controversies (Twitter is also currently involved in a British libel case), and it probably won’t be the last.

However, maybe a better question about government-enforced secrecy efforts would be… In an age of instant, ubiquitous, world-wide social media, is a gag order like this even remotely enforceable?