Privacy issues, or ‘I need to know my mate’s phone number’
Posted by schoolspirit on 21 April, 2008
This particular topic poked its nose out at me over the last few days due to an issue I read on a few other blogs over the weekend. While I don’t want to go into detail, be content to know it involved the privacy and general safety of kids and the unknowns of people’s true identities when masked behind an internet username and small square avatar picture. If you think you may well own one of the blogs I’m speaking of and are wondering why there’s no links, it’s because I’d rather keep topics like that at a little more than arm’s reach from School Spirit. Hopefully you understand.
Anyway, it got me thinking about the personal information I have access to both now and previously with children past and present. I consider myself an honest, loyal sort of person, so the information and knowledge I have about certain kids (well, all of them, really, but in some cases the information about some kids is more… personal… than others) will stay safely away from the ears of people who don’t need to know, but sometimes I pity the way the world is turning when innocent little events make me look at stuff like this in a more simple light.
It’s a pretty straightforward professional rule. As a teacher, I’m not allowed to disclose personal information about any of the kids to anybody outside of the school staff, although you don’t generally have to because much of that sort of information is available for us through the school records anyway. It’s a rule that makes perfect sense, too. You can’t just fling the odd phone number, address or medical status of the kids out willy nilly to any old character that wanders in to ask for it. Who knows what purpose they may have for the information? You can never be too safe, can you?
But how do you explain that to an eight year old?
In our room, each grade has a class roll. The names of all of the kids in the grade are listed there alphabetically by surname, and as you’d expect, we keep records of which days they have missed, whether they’ve gone to medical appointments, extended holidays or gone home early because their little brother’s broken his arm playing ‘I’m a bigger moron than you’ (the rules of which are usually to jump off the highest surface possible – bonus points if it’s a hard surface underneath!). It also holds information such as parent names, birthdates, addresses and phone numbers. Obviously, the kids aren’t meant to go looking through it because of the sensitive information inside it. Not that they care – they just like looking at all the little marks I make on each page. But this is where the boundaries get a little blurry sometimes.
You see, the kids know their addresses and phone numbers are in there. They’re not interested enough to look, they just know they’re there. So last Friday this little eight year old feller spent his Free Time Friday (once he’d finished his weekly work, naturally) trotting around the room collecting phone numbers from some of the other boys so he could ring them to come to his birthday party sometime this week. One of the kids couldn’t remember his, so he came up to me with what I thought was a good little solution to his problem.
‘Mr V, can you look in the roll and tell me his phone number so I can ring him about my birthday?’
I have to say no.
Although he accepted that I wasn’t allowed to do that, try as I might, he just couldn’t understand the reason why.
If only they could stay that innocent longer, eh?
April 22nd, 2008 at 10:02 pm
‘Mr V, can you look in the roll and tell me his phone number so I can ring him about my birthday?’
Would it have worked for the kid who’s number it was to have asked you?
Over here (UK), the data protection laws let you access your own information (presumably so you can check that it’s accurate, and see what personal data other people are holding about you). The main obstacle is finding out who’s keeping records on you in the first place.
The current big problem here is with state agencies, the NHS, and businesses, losing peoples’ records – paper files which should have been securely disposed of turning up in public places, and computers, memory sticks, discs, etc., being stolen or just going missing, containing unencrypted personal data.
My guess is that things like people taking work home with them, then leaving it on the bus; having their laptop stolen from their car; just binning paper records after they’ve been entered into the computer – would probably be the main sort of risk for a school?
April 22nd, 2008 at 10:09 pm
To be honest, I haven’t looked too deeply into it. I mean… I usually leave the classroom door unlocked through the day even when we’re not in there! I throw most of that sort of stuff into the recycle box in the corner of the room and it gets cleaned out once a week. I actually don’t know where it goes after that, but none of that’s sensitive stuff, I would think. That sort of stuff you don’t tend to throw out.
I probably would have checked the phone number had it been the other kid who asked me, actually. Never even thought of it, to be honest. Probably had a bit to do with being elbow deep in a pile of school work I was handing out at the time.