New Tool to Help Ed-Tech Vendors Navigate AI Privacy - GovTech

Common Sense Media has spawned a for-profit affiliate called Common Sense Privacy, and it has built a framework to help ed-tech vendors check their privacy practices against 'existing and emerging AI legislation.' Note the honesty of that word 'emerging': half the rules do not exist yet, so vendors are being graded against a test nobody has set. Somebody has to sell them the answer sheet, and it is touching that 'common' survives in the branding even as the legislation goes state by state. Common sense, it turns out, is what you call a product when the law cannot be common.

The framework's stated purpose is to create 'a common set of criteria' for companies to report how their AI products handle student data and what privacy protections they have in place. That is the whole trick: the criteria are common, the reporting is done by the vendor, and the audience is the vendor. The students, as ever, remain the raw material. Soon enough a procurement officer somewhere will be handed a document with a green tick on it and told the privacy question has been dealt with — which is roughly the instinct we watched Tennessee apply when it proposed electronically monitoring AI activity and calling it governance.

None of this is anyone's particular fault. It is the predictable result of legislating student data protection one statehouse at a time, which leaves vendors performing compliance theatre in a different dialect wherever they happen to sell. Asking them to write it all down in a shared format is genuinely better than nothing, and probably cheaper than retaining a lawyer per state. It is just very noticeably not a law, and Common Sense Privacy is very noticeably for-profit, which remains the most common arrangement of all.