What SD51 can see when students use school-managed devices
School District 51 published a Sept. 24 notice explaining what information it collects through district-owned devices and its use of Lightspeed Systems.
Photo credit: School District 51
GRAND FORKS — School District 51 says it collects information about the websites and applications used on district-owned devices, along with screen time and technical information about the devices and school network, under a technology-management system operated by Lightspeed Systems.
The Boundary school district published a notice Sept. 24 explaining what information is collected through school-managed devices and accounts and setting out limits on its use of Lightspeed. The district says its deployment does not include web-content filtering or student-safety monitoring and does not collect device-location information.
According to SD51, the information collected includes applications and websites used, screen time, device health, on-campus network and internet performance, and network-security signals. The district says the collection is limited to district-owned devices used on district premises.
That means the notice covers information about how school devices and accounts are being used, but it does not say the district is recording screens, reading students' communications, collecting keystrokes, activating cameras or microphones, or tracking the physical location of devices.
The distinction is significant because Lightspeed Systems offers a wider range of products and monitoring functions than SD51 says it has deployed. Lightspeed's products include web filtering, student-safety monitoring and other classroom and device-management tools. Its privacy policy says schools determine which services are used and that Lightspeed collects data needed for the functions a school has purchased or contracted for.
SD51 says it collects the information under section 26(c) of B.C.'s Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act and the School Act. Section 26(c) allows a public body to collect personal information when the information relates directly to and is necessary for one of the public body's programs or activities.
The district says the information is being collected to manage its technology, maintain device and network reliability, evaluate the use and cost of educational software, and maintain data-privacy compliance.
SD51's notice does not identify a specific section of the School Act or provide a more detailed breakdown of the individual data fields collected under categories such as device health and network-security signals.
The district also says the information is processed and stored by Lightspeed Systems.
SD51 does not state in its notice where that storage is geographically located. Lightspeed's own student-data privacy information says data handled by the company is stored in Amazon Web Services data centres in the United States. The company's privacy policy says Lightspeed acts as a data processor when providing services to schools, while the school determines how student data is used within the services it has selected.
Lightspeed says the student data it may handle while providing services can include names, email addresses, device information or identifiers and usage data. That company-wide description does not establish that every category is being collected through SD51's particular deployment. SD51's Sept. 24 notice provides the narrower description of what is collected locally.
The district's notice also leaves some questions unanswered, including how long information from SD51 devices is retained, precisely what information falls under “device health” and “network-security signals,” and whether its data is stored under the U.S. hosting arrangement described in Lightspeed's public privacy documentation.
For students and families, the district's disclosure establishes that use of a school-owned device on district property can generate records showing which websites and applications were used and how much screen time occurred, along with technical information about the device and network. SD51 says location tracking, web-content filtering and student-safety monitoring are not part of its Lightspeed deployment.
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