Parents in the US fight to get records of their kids' online activities deleted

School district now conducts an annual 'Data Deletion Week' to purge unnecessary student information from the Google platform and other online applications

A group of parents in Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS), in a suburb of Washington DC, have fought to implement an annual "Data Deletion Week" to ensure that the records of their kids ' online activities are deleted from the database of the school and tech firms.

The first "Data Deletion Week" by MCPS was conducted in August this year, where the MCPS staff deleted unnecessary student information from the Google platform as well as other online applications that students use, such as GoGuardian, Apple Education, and myMCPS Classroom.

"It ' s a strategy to protect student privacy in the digital age," MCPS spokesman Derek Turner said.

This campaign was led by Bradley Shear, an attorney who specialises in social media and privacy policy.

Last year, Shear was at a conference for privacy law scholar when he got a phone call from school authorities, telling him that his son was in trouble for searching a song with explicit lyrics on Google on his school laptop.

Shear ' s son was in second grade at that time, and Shear believes the incident was likely a result of Google auto-populating the search.

Shear was worried that the search term would remain in his son ' s "digital footprint" for years and could return "to bite" him later. He wanted to ensure that the records of his son ' s web search are deleted by GoGuardian, the firm that had the contract with the district administration to monitor students ' website visits and searches.

Shear shared his concerns with district officials and with the district ' s parent-teacher association.

He drew their attention to a recent situation, in which Harvard University cancelled the admission of Kyle Kashuv, a survivor of February 2018 mass school shooting in Parkland, Florida, after finding that Kashuv had made some racist comments online.

Shear was happy to find some support from district officials as well as the parent-teacher association. One member of the "safe tech committee" of the parent-teacher association told the Guardian that she had to go through a similar experience, where her then eight-year-old son searched the term "save the land" to complete an assignment, but the search result showed the link for "Ku Klux Klan … ' Save the land, join the Klan."

She discussed the issue with her son ' s teacher and suggested to delete the search from her son ' s browser history. However, the teacher told her that would not be possible.

Eventually, the parents and school officials worked together to go through each contract the district had signed with various technology firms to see what language needed to be changed in those contract.

All those efforts led to re-writing of contracts that required tech firms to certify that the data of students had been fully deleted and not simply kept and "de-identified."