Students will have to Allow Teachers to Check Search History in Denmark
A new law relating to students in Denmark is making privacy headlines. The law in question has proposed by Merete Riisager the country’s education minister encourages students to provide their schools unfiltered access to their personal laptops. While the intention behind this move is to make it harder for students to cheat in examinations, it is being seeing as a medium for school to violate the privacy of their students.
The draft law will introduce rules that will allow schools to to carry out background checks on the students search history and social media activity. It goes as far as to allow examiners to examine a student’s laptop log files and more when deemed necessary. The proposal has already been forwarded for further consideration.
We should note however, that schools cannot force each and every student to hand over their personal laptops for examination instead, student have to give their consent before their laptops can be examined. To get around this, schools will be allowed to enforce strict penalties on students who refuse to provide consent – from having their machines confiscated to even being expelled – thereby giving students little choice.
The rules have received a fair amount of backlash from both students and teachers with many terming the rules an unfair invasion of an individual’s privacy – an inference agreed to by The chairman of the Danish High School Association, Jens Philip Yazdani. Further support against the implementation on these rules has come from the chairman of the IT Political Association, Jesper Lund, and law professor Sten Schaumburg-Müller from the University of Southern Denmark.
Sources: Geek Reply