Nonprofit watchdog group the Electronic Privacy Information Center filed a Freedom of Information Act request January 26 to delve into the reasons why the U.S. Department of Defense has purchased a year’s worth of school-district Internet-use logs amassed by N2H2, manufacturer of Bess filtering software. The data, called Class Clicks, is an aggregated compilation of nonidentifying information on students’ surfing habits, broken down into estimates of the monitored children’s demographics. N2H2 currently filters some 20% of the nation’s school districts that use blocking software, according to the January 26 Wall Street Journal.
Asserting that N2H2 would never betray its clients’ trust, Director of Analytics Cory Finnell told the Journal that “to date, we haven’t had a single school district that has asked us to remove it from the sample.” However, a December 1999 report that the firm was collecting data made no reference to plans to sell the information.
Citing decisions by the ACLU and ALA to challenge the Child Internet Protection Act, which mandates filters for schools and libraries receiving e-rate discounts, EPIC Executive Director Marc Rotenberg told the Wired online news service January 29 that Class Clicks is “another reason mandatory filtering imposes an unconstitutional privacy burden on schoolchildren.”
Posted February 5, 2001.