Update on Naviance $17.25 privacy lawsuit court settlement
1. Last chance to sign up for our Skinny Award dinner, tomorrow night, Tuesday May 19, when we will honor the incomparable Diane Ravitch, the prolific author, blogger, advocate and fierce defender of our public schools. More information and purchase your ticket here; which could include an autographed copy of her recently released memoirs.
2. I have yet to hear from any NYC parents who received notification of the $17.25 million dollar settlement of the Naviance class action privacy lawsuit. alleging the improper disclosure of their children’s personal data, including their names, ID numbers, graduation years, demographic information, photographs and survey responses, as well as their private communications with teachers.
Families are eligible to apply for a portion of this settlement if their children logged onto the Naviance portal at least once during the period beginning on August 18, 2021 through January 23, 2026.
As Naviance is used in many NYC high schools, and the DOE has yet to inform affected families as far as I know, I reached out to the lead attorney who litigated the case – Scott Drury from Chicago.
Scott is very concerned that all potential beneficiaries should be notified, and asked me to reach out as widely as possible with the following information:
If there are NYC students who have graduated or parents of current students who did not receive an email regarding the Naviance settlement and want to participate, they can do the following:
- Send an email to contact@drurylegal.com with the subject “QJ v. PowerSchool Class Action Settlement”
- In the email, they should include:
- Student’s Name
- Email address the student used to log into Naviance
- If the student is a minor, the parent’s name and email address
3. Note that parents can only submit claims on behalf of minor students. Non-minor students (18 and older) need to submit claims themselves. But parents of students of any age can reach out to Scott if they have the requisite information.
Please share this information as widely as possible, as many current and former high school students outside NYC are likely to be eligible as well.
It is regrettable than neither the city nor the state has yet recognized that families should be informed about this lawsuit and its settlement, and to communicate what they are doing to investigate this likely violation of law on the part of PowerSchool, the owner of Naviance– especially given that PowerSchool has already been shown to violate the privacy laws for not using the most data security protections to prevent the massive breach of its Student Information System last year. PowerSchool has been sued in multiple states and districts for that breach, which affected millions of students nationwide and thousands in NYC.
Naviance itself was reported to sell targeted college ads to students in its platform, disguised as objective recommendations and to allow colleges to discriminate in its advertising based on the student’s race – very likely illegal under Ed Law 2d as well as anti-discrimination laws.
Instead, DOE still allows PowerSchool to collect and process the data of NYC students via 16 other products according to its website , including very sensitive special education and behavioral information. Finally, as I pointed out to DOE officials years ago, the PowerSchool privacy agreement that is posted on the DOE website says that they will only comply with federal or state privacy law – or their own contract with DOE – when they consider it “commercially reasonable,” which should have been a dead giveaway not to work with this company.
This Naviance issue is yet more evidence of a lack of responsible stewardship on the part of DOE when it comes to safeguarding student privacy, as further confirmed by the Comptroller’s audit released two weeks ago, also reported by the Daily News. If the DOE were truly concerned with safeguarding student privacy, they would also carefully examine the issues involved in this lawsuit, because the sort of data tracking and disclosure that Naviance is alleged to have engaged in may be employed by many of the other ed tech products commonly used in NYC schools every day.
Again, if you support our advocacy on student privacy issues such as this and informing parents as to their rights to keep their children’s data safe, as well as the need for smaller classes and dislodging damaging AI products from our schools, please consider purchasing a ticket for tomorrow’s Skinny dinner or making a tax-deductible donation to Class Size Matters.
We are a very skinny organization and we rely on your support to keep going.
Hope to see you tomorrow night, Leonie
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