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Important Artificial Intelligence (AI) FERPA/COPPA/Privacy Considerations
Facts you should be aware of
AI products can be incredible tools when individuals understand the privacy risks and considerations.
Most (all?) Free AI tools (exceptions: Google Gemini for Education and other FERPA compliant AI tools) take any information and questions you feed into it and add that data to their public AI database to allow it to improve its future responses.
Its possible that the data you feed in could come back out to another individual in part or in whole (although rare)
Your data goes into a database (public in many cases) owned by the AI company.
Is your data being sold?
What happens with the data if the company goes out of business or gets hacked?
Use AI products safely (see bullets below)
Always assess if the product is FERPA/COPPA Compliant especially if educators plan on utilizing an AI tool with students. Most also limit their use to 18 and over (some 13 and over) in their terms of service due to privacy and regulatory facts.
Always sanitize data (remove any Personally Identifiable Information/PII and FERPA information, banking/financial information etc..) before submission to any AI products.
Never submit student pictures to AI products that have not been approved by parents.
Never link your district Google (or any accounts) to AI products without fully understanding what you are sharing from your account (for instance the free/personal/NON Educational version of Google Gemini can suck in your emails and google docs into its public learning model and also has human reviewers that can review your submitted questions and data for enhancing their AI model. Other products can have similar privacy considerations).
FERPA: https://www2.ed.gov/ferpa
COPPA (limits data collection for kids under 13 and other restrictions): https://www.ftc.gov/legal-library/browse/rules/childrens-online-privacy-protection-rule-coppa
If you have questions or concerns please do not hesitate to reach out to REMC1 - support@remc1.net
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