It seems everybody is up in arms — and for good reason — over a report by MSNBC that N2H2 is selling data about students’ web surfing habits.
N2H2 sells web filtering software to schools. It’s been a business failure in that market so it decided to sell aggregated data about what sites students are visiting. N2H2 says it doesn’t sell what specific sites a given student visits, but rather say information on how many time students in a school district visited CNN’s home page, for example. This is very valuable information even when it is aggregated in this way.
Is this legal? Is it ethical?
Actually this would seem to be a pretty clear case of a human rights violation. Once N2H2 takes the aggregated data of the students and begins turning it into reports which it then markets to other companies, it is engaged in research and the students are human test subjects.
There are stringent rules and regulations about the treatment of human test subjects, especially when they are captive audiences such as school children are. Where I work, for example, we do a lot of research asking kids about their opinion of their schools. The data is aggregated as N2H2 does, so what a particular student thought about his school is never reported back.
To do this we have to follow strict rules that are overseen by a review board on human experiments. The key thing we have to do which N2H2 is unlikely to have done is give students the ability not to participate in the study. If they don’t want to tell us what they think of their school, that is their right.
Similarly, although N2H2 may have a legitimate contract to block students from accessing certain web sites, if it is going to collect and aggregate data about what students are viewing on the web it has to give every student the right to opt out and exclude his or her web surfing behavior from the aggregated data.
If I were a student at a school that uses an N2H2 product I’d consider a lawsuit on the grounds that N2H2 is acting in contravention to numerous laws protecting the rights of test subjects to be informed and to decline to be the subject of research.