School data breaches and other important privacy updates

Feb. 7, 2025

An important update on privacy news:

1.As reported by the Daily News last night, four NYC schools were affected by the massive PowerSchool breach that occurred in December- contrary to previous assurances from the DOE: Fordham HS for the Arts; Long Island City High School; Lower East Side Prep and Westchester Square Academy.

It is important that parents, students, and even former students at these schools be informed of the breach, if they do not know about it already, especially as this hack could potentially lead to Identity theft. PowerSchool is offering free ID theft insurance and credit monitoring to victims, more info here.

On my blog, I discuss how DOE has unacceptably delayed informing parents about this breach, as well as my long-standing concerns about the weaknesses of the PowerSchool contract with DOE. PowerSchool has 17 different data-hungry products that DOE has encouraged schools to use, and none of them should be regarded as safe.

If you yourself are a parent at any of these schools, or know others who are, please alert them to this breach as soon as possible. They can also email us at [email protected] and I will try to answer their questions to the best of my ability.

2.Gizmodo ran an article this week describing how Talkspace, the company which has a $26 million dollar contract with NYC to provide online mental health services to teens, has expanded its reach to Baltimore and Seattle, despite our findings that they share the personal data of website visitors and clients with numerous ad-trackers embedded on their website and social media companies, including the same companies that cities like NYC and Seattle have sued for undermining teen mental health.

One clarification: though the article notes that after we brought attention to this issue, ad-trackers were removed from the NYC Teenspace landing page, we found that many other pages on its website are still tracking and disclosing their personal data, including to TikTok and more. We wrote about this in our letter sent to the NYC Department of Health a month ago, and yet have seen little improvement.

Even worse, as Gizmodo revealed, Talkspace is now developing a “Personalized Podcast” designed by AI, that harvests patients’ personal mental health info from their therapy sessions and feeds it back to them in the form of a sound file. One can only imagine the damage this could cause to vulnerable teens if someone got hold of the sound files on their phones or they themselves played them back inadvertently in public. Not even considering how the use of AI chatbots can itself be perilous, as shown by the recent lawsuit filed by parents who allege that a chatbot caused their son to commit suicide.

Parents: If your child has visited the Teenspace website or has signed up for their services, please contact us at [email protected] as soon as possible.

3.One piece of good news. The Chancellor has created a Data Privacy Work Group group as she promised earlier, to discuss and improve the DOE privacy regulations. I have been invited to be a member, along with several other privacy advocates and parent leaders. Hopefully, we will be able to work together to improve the DOE’s overall policies and practices which currently do not adequately prioritize student privacy and safety. I will keep you all updated on our efforts going forward.

4.Finally, despite the crush of privacy news, I haven’t forgotten about the need for DOE to improve its planning to allow all schools to offer the smaller classes their students need . If you haven’t already done so, please sign our petition, urging the city to come up with a realistic and effective multi-year plan that complies with the law. It has 922 signatures so far, but I’d like it to get it to 1000 signers before presenting it to the Chancellor.

We are also open to giving class size presentations to CECs, Community Boards and Presidents Councils to explain the serious flaws in the DOE’s approach and how they can help us make the critical goal of smaller classes a reality for all NYC children.

Thanks,

Leonie Haimson
Executive Director
Class Size Matters
124 Waverly Pl.
New York, NY 10011
phone: 917-435-9329
[email protected]
http://www.classsizematters.org/

Follow on twitter @leoniehaimson