Sign up now to hear about the threat to Student Privacy from the city's irresponsible disclosure of student data including via Teenspace

Please join us to learn about the threats to student privacy from breaches and DOE carelessly sharing personal information with ed tech, AI, charter schools, and other unscrupulous third parties, at this briefing on Wed. October  23 at 7 PM EST; you can register here. Co-sponsored with AQE, Class Size Matters and the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy.

One of the troubling issues we will be talking about is Teenspace.  On Sept. 10, along with NYCLU and AI for Families, NYCLU, PCSP and AI for Families wrote the Mayor, the DOE Chancellor, and the Commissioner of  Health about our deep concerns about the way in which the Privacy Policy of the online mental health company Teenspace discloses the personal information of students to unnamed third parties for marketing purposes in a manner that would be illegal if the contract was signed by the DOE rather than the Dept. of Health. 

The Teenspace parent company, Talkspace, is being paid $26 million over three years by the city to provide free counseling to students, and Mayor Adams, the Department of Health and the DOE have all been aggressively encouraging NYC students to sign up for these services, with no mention of how their personal data could be used for predatory marketing which could further undermine their mental health.   More on this here.

On Sept. 23,  Dept. of Health responded to our letter, arguing that they did not have to abide by the state student privacy law since they were not an education agency, but assuring us that their contract was no less  protective.  On Oct. 8,  we received the Talkspace contract via a Freedom of Information Law request.

The contract did not dispel our concerns.  Since we sent our initial letter, we had discovered that when a NYC student visits the Teenspace website on their phone, their personally identifiable information is shared with 15 ad trackers and 34 cookies, as well as Facebook, Amazon, Meta, Google, and Microsoft among others, which we saw from using the Blacklight  privacy audit tool. These findings were later confirmed by a security company that does privacy analyses.  These findings are particularly concerning, given how the city is suing many of these companies for undermining children's mental health and designing their algorithms to be addictive for the purposes of targeted advertising .

Our follow-up letter to the Dept. of Health is below, copied to other city officials.  Please join us at our Privacy Forum to hear more about this issue and other ways student data is being breached and purposely disclosed in ways that undermine student privacy.