However, a new study has revealed that not only were kids learning from these apps, but advertisers and third-party apps were also learning about the apps’ users.
Educational Apps Are Alleged to Be Sharing Students’ Personal Data
A nonprofit organization called the Me2B Alliance has conducted a study claiming that 60 percent of school applications are sharing students’ information with third parties such as Google, Facebook, and Apple.
The organization based the research on the software development kits (SDKs) used to build educational mobile apps.
For the audit, the testing team randomly picked 73 mobile applications from 38 schools around the US. They chose both Android and iOS apps to compare the results of the two platforms.
Also, both public and private school apps were analyzed by the researchers.
What Kind of Information Is Being Shared?
Most of the educational apps ask the student’s name, age, and other personal information when creating their account. According to the Me2B study, a large number of the analyzed applications also requested the following permissions:
Identity Calendar Contacts Photos/Media/Files Location USB Storage
Some of the apps also wanted access to the students’ phone camera, microphone, and call information.
Who Can Access the Students’ Personal Data?
The researchers claim that “63% of all SDKs used by the studied educational apps were owned by either Google (48.6%) or Facebook (14.4%).” This means that all or a part of the previously mentioned data was transmitted mainly to Google or Facebook.
Android Apps Are Considered Less Reliable
Researchers have concluded that there is a 91 percent likelihood of third-party data leakage from Android apps. And since only 32 percent of the educational iOS apps were sending information to advertisers, iOS users are safer.
The study has also concluded that educational Android applications are eight times more likely than iOS ones to include very high risk SDKs, so they can be considered less reliable.
What Can We Do About This Issue?
Even though this research is not comprehensive, the results are quite disturbing. Making sure that students’ privacy is not at risk should be the primary goal when it comes to creating applications for education.
The Me2B Alliance says that one of the effective ways to ensure that there is no data leakage from such apps is by improving them and keeping them up-to-date with the privacy-enhancing practices.
So it is mainly up to the developers to ensure that educational apps are safe to use.
