Apps against the law?

With app rollouts in schools often delivered to parents and pupils as a done deal, there are questions surrounding the legal implications of such services. While schools can collect and process data without consent because of the “public task” cause for data collection under data-protection laws, this only applies to the schools themselves. App companies lay out their credentials in privacy policies and terms and conditions, but they may not be able to rely on the school’s data-collection regime to process that data. “The delivery of educational services comes under public task’, but only covers processing which is necessary–that would absolutely exclude data-harvesting for profiling, consumer tracking, marketing, commercial trade and machine learning,” said Protecture’s Rowenna Fielding. “Those would require parental consent to be obtained separately to agreement to software licence terms…