N2H2 stops selling student Web-surfing data
ben...@peacefire.org
Yesterday N2H2, makers of the popular school blocking software program
"Bess", announced that they would stop selling data that had been gathered
by tracking the surfing habits of students:
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20010222/tc/kids_privacy_1.html
Since 1999, N2H2 had been aggregating the data gathered from monitoring
students whose Internet access was filtered by Bess, and selling its "Class
Clicks" reports based on that data. The monthly reports cost $15,000 per
year. An N2H2 spokesperson said that personally indentifiable information
about individual students was not collected or sold.
N2H2 had come under fire for selling students' Web-surfing data in the last
few months, with one of their most vocal critics being Nancy Willard, a
researcher at the Center for Advanced Technology in Education at the
University of Oregon. In the last few weeks, her criticisms attracted more
high-profile attention:
http://www.edweek.org/ew/ewstory.cfm?slug=21filter.h20
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2678941,00.html
One of the purchasers of the "Class Clicks" data was the Department of
Defense, which said at the time that they thought it would be "appealing"
to find out how students were using military Web sites. The Electronic
Privacy Information Center (EPIC.org) has filed Freedom Of Information Act
and Open Records Act requests to find out more about how schools using Bess
were collecting the data, and how the Department of Defense was using it.
Their FOIA request is at: http://www.epic.org/open_gov/dodfoian2h2.html
Most of Peacefire's reports have focused on the different issue of the
inaccuracy in Bess's Web site blocking (our report at
http://www.peacefire.org/censorware/BESS/second-1000-com-domains.html
concluded that about 20% of .com sites blocked by Bess were errors, and we
also listed sites blocked by Bess in our two most recent reports at
http://www.peacefire.org/amnesty-intercepted/ and
http://www.peacefire.org/blind-ballots/ ). The advertising and
overblocking issues are intertwined, though, since Bess uses its "You have
been blocked" page to display ads to students, meaning that the more sites
they blocked, the more ad revenue they earned. (Bess was also the only
blocking program that blocked all free home page sites by default --
accounting for a large proportion of the complaints we received from
students who tried to access a research-related site, only to find it
blocked and replaced with a sponsored advertisement.)
-Bennett
ben...@peacefire.org http://www.peacefire.org
(425) 649 9024
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