Newstrition, School Data Privacy Officers -– Talking Tech w/ Lata Nott & Teddy Hartman
Host Brian Wesolowski brings in Lata Nott of the Freedom Forum Institute to discuss Newstrition, an interactive tool (created jointly with the Newseum and Our.News) that makes it easy for the public to make informed decisions about what is real and what is “junk” news.<br><br>Then, Brian sits down with Teddy Hartman from the Howard County Public Schools. He shares a local perspective on how school districts can proactively address student privacy issues, tackling strong privacy practices and the use of new technology.<br><br>More on Newstrition: http://bit.ly/ffinewstrition<br><br>More on Lata: https://twitter.com/latanott<br>More on Teddy: http://bit.ly/2z9xnbW<br>More on our host, Brian: bit.ly/cdtbrian<br><br>Attribution: sounds used from Psykophobia, Taira Komori, BenKoning, Zabuhailo, bloomypetal, guitarguy1985, bmusic92, and offthesky of freesound.org.
Top Keywords
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- howard county 0.008
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- parents 0.006
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- student privacy 0.005
- school 0.005
- publishers 0.005
Transcript
Welcome to Tech Talk. Bye.
See. Tea. Welcome to CDT's Tech Talk, where we dish on tech and Internet policy, while also explaining what these policies mean to our daily lives. I'm Brian Wasilowski, and it's time to talk tech. Today, we'll be talking about a new web tool that will help you have a better media diet. It's definitely possible with just a little bit of help. And we'll also bring you a local perspective on how school districts can proactively address student privacy issues. Yes. You can have strong privacy practices and use new technology. How informed are you about the news you're reading online? Do you know if your news diet is balanced and filled with actual facts? For anyone who gets their news online, it's clear that plenty of people do not have a nutritious news diet. Well, now there's a tool to help. The Newseum, Freedom Forum Institute, and r. News recently launched Newstrition, an interactive tool that makes it easy for the public to make informed decisions about what is real and what is junk news. Lata Knott, the executive director of the First Amendment Center at the Freedom Forum Institute, joins us to talk about News Trishin. Welcome, Lata. Thanks for having me, Brian. That was a really chipper reading through of all those names. It was pretty good. Right? Yeah. I know. I mean, News Trishin. This is great. What is nutrition? Tell us about it. Well, aside from being an amazing pun,
it is Did you come up with it? I think I did because I'm a huge pun
a pundit, if you will. Oh, my goodness. This is really bad. Off to a great start. Keep going. You you can edit the sounds. Okay.
So nutrition, basically, it's an online application that helps consumers, news consumers, which is basically all of us. It helps them kinda make sense of the news that they're reading online. And what I mean by that is, it'll tell you a little bit about the publisher who's behind the story you're reading, which people kinda forget about when they're looking at, news stories in, like, their Facebook feed or on Twitter. It's like, wait. Who made this exactly? What are they about? Are they do they have, like, some kind of partisan slant?
What? There's partisan news out there? Just a little bit here and there. Yeah.
And also just about, like, actual news stories, like, what sources do they link to within the story? Is there anything out there refuting what they're talking about? You know, we also have people who register for the app, and they can basically vote, not on whether it's good or bad, but whether they think it's news or opinion or has a misleading headline or satire. So it kinda gives you just a bit of extra context without telling you what you should or shouldn't read. So it's kinda like a nutrition label where you know a little bit about what's inside what you're eating, but we're not telling you not to eat it. You can certainly consume whatever you like. Cool. So let's get back to some of those in just a second. But tell me about your partners on this. I didn't I, of course, know the Newseum. I've been there. I love it. Freedom Forum Institute, new name, same wonderful group that you've worked for for a bit. Right? Who is r dot news? R dot news is a media startup. They're located in Upstate New York, and they were working on this on an app to basically get the public involved in figuring out what's fake news and what's what's real news. Around the same time we started working on it, we were everybody was kinda thinking about this independently. And when we, when we ended up meeting up with them, we realized we were kind of in sync about what we were thinking of, which is there's been a lot of different organizations approaching this problem. And I don't I'm not gonna say that one approach is the best approach. But if there is best approach, it's ours, obviously. Obviously. There's a lot of different approaches you can take. And we haven't seen what works and what doesn't yet. But a lot of other organizations were kinda taking an approach of telling consumers this is quality news and this is not. We That's a tough call to make. It's it's kind of a tough call to make. Like, there's value in that, but it can be hard to really categorize things. And, also, some studies show that readers don't really like that that much. Mhmm. In fact, if if somebody tells you this organization that you you love is untrustworthy, it just makes you kind of of mad at the reviewer more than it it makes you think like, oh, well, then I won't read them anymore. So we wanted to take a different approach where it was basically we're not telling you whether it's good or bad. We're just telling you a bit more about it because
you don't get that that same information anymore when you're just looking at, like, a post in your Facebook feed. Yeah. So this is kind of, I mean, not surprising you work at an organization that loves the news. So kind of going back to fact based approach to sharing information with folks. So tell me, so this is a a plugin essentially for web browsers right now. Mhmm. Does it work on mobile?
Not yet. Not yet. That's development in the beta phase. Right? Yeah. Right now, it's just a Chrome and a Mozilla, browser extension. But, you know, it's it can be integrated with other,
websites that have news feeds. And we're we're gonna get to more. So, like, the Facebook news feed, for example, might be a good one to use this on? For example. For example, Twitter, maybe. So you use it, you see a story, and then you, what, you click on it. Is that right? How does this work? Just walking through how this works. If you were to download the extension, you'd get a lovely blue icon in your little extension bar. You're reading a a story. You click on the on the little blue icon, and your little nutrition,
pop up pops up. Oh. Yeah. And it will Nice. And it'll tell you, like, oh, okay. So this organization that it just published this story, they're, like, they're a satire site, just so you know, or they're a news site that's existed since eighteen o four. I mean, not the website, but, you know, the organization.
That would be amazing.
Yeah. Some some people are ahead of their time, so I don't know. Yeah. And so you'll get that information. You can explore the pop up a little more if you wanna dig deeper, like, actually fact check the story. But, you know, the idea is just to make it kinda unobtrusive
simple for consumers, hopefully. That's great. So you shared some of the information that they can find there. Is any of that specific information stuff that you think is most relevant to assessing the quality of news? You mentioned things like the publisher, you know, when it was founded. What do you think is kind of the most important things that people should be reading in their news tradition if they really want
healthy news? For me, there's two things. Okay. The mission statement of the publisher. I think that's, like, a hugely important thing because usually, you will see right there if they're like you know, there's some, publishers of very partisan news, and they're not really trying to hide the ball there. They're like, we're here to expose the lies of the mainstream media or, you know, we're here to represent the resistance or whatever. So I think that's good context for you to have, when you're when you're looking at a headline. And like I said, it's usually not hidden information. Some deceptive news outlets out there, but that's not really the big issue right now. In 2016, there were a lot of websites founded by Macedonian teenagers that were there to do people. Right. It's the information, ecosystem is less like that. It's more like there's a lot of hyperpartisan news, and you should know when you're reading hyperpartisan news. Not telling you not to, but you should be aware that that's the slant that you're getting.
So I think that's the most important thing. That's great. And how many news sources do you have? I mean, I assume you can't cover everything because how could you know about everything? But if you click on it, how many news sources are part of Nutrition right now? At this point, I would say we have,
700 give or take, verified publishers. Okay. So what we did is we concentrated on the publishers get that get shared engagements the most on Facebook and Twitter and and social media. And then we also focused on known shall should I say fake? Fake, known fake, and also known, like, questionable publishers of information. So we wanted to get that all into the first set. The cool thing about it is that the nutrition profiles are pretty streamlined, so we can verify them pretty quickly, as as new things come up. And that's actually the interesting thing about, about online news. Like, you have new publishers just cropping up every week. They didn't exist, and then all of a sudden, they're, like, in, NewsWhip's top 10 most shared websites. You know? So you gotta you gotta You gotta be on it. Right. You gotta be on it. And, actually, what we just did was we launched a special page to cover midterms related news and news related to, like, the five closest senate races just so we could kinda see what was being shared and fact check that really quickly. And, you know, we I ended up verifying, oh, I think, like, 70 publishers in the past week just because of that. I've never heard of them, but their story is going viral. So, you know, it's Wow. Yeah. You rip up. Is there a big team behind this, or is it just you? It's me and a couple of wonderful, hardworking, journalism grad students. Great. Yeah. They've they have been the best help to me. Can I name them, actually? Yeah. Do it. Shout out. Sarah Gibson and Kristen Griffith. They're both graduates of, American University's journalism program. And Fantastic. Yeah. They've they've just been so on it. And, you know, it's the kind of thing where it takes you have to act quickly, but you also wanna provide a consumer with the most accurate information that's also helpful. It's not the easiest thing. Yeah. Well, we'll give them snaps so we don't clap and make the mic pop but snaps. Well, I did it for you. Double snap. So great for them. Tell us about, you alluded to this or mentioned it earlier. The
someone who has the news search and app can actually start to rate the news or give feedback on it. What how does that work? What are the things that they're actually assessing it on? Well, you can use it without registering. But, you know, if you wanna if you wanna kinda partake in in
helping other people understand the news, you register for an account. You can do it through Facebook or or Twitter or anything like that or or make up your own account. And then that's when it gets interesting because, well, to me, it gets interesting to me. But, you know, when you're looking at a news story, automatically within the the nutrition app, you're gonna get a list of the sources the news story links, which is cool because a lot of times people sort of they read something. They see a lot of hyperlinks, but they don't really click on them. They're like, oh, well, they they link things. It's gotta be true. But, like, you know, it's actually nice to see those things and be like, oh, all their links are to their own website. Interesting. Oh.
No. CDT never does that. Not that we're a nutrition, but we always link to outside sources.
I I don't doubt it. Sometimes ourselves. But Right. A little bit. Always. But, so you see that. You see all the the sources that the article links. If you're registered, you can add your own sources either refuting or supporting or just adding more context to the story. So what's neat about that is we don't have a comment feature because that way lies hell. Right? Yeah. That could be trouble. Yeah. We've seen that fail in a lot of places. Right. Right. But you know, and we don't have an upvote or downvote feature, but it's actually kinda cool because it's like you can participate, but you gotta think about it first. You know, you don't get to just, like, troll a a news publisher you don't like. If you wanna, like, say this is false, find stuff that proves that it's false. Kind of the Wikipedia model of things. It takes a little bit more work to to do it, but it makes the content a little bit better. Right. Exactly. So that that's kind of what we were hoping. Like, get people's better instincts than they're. Like, if you really wanna prove somebody right or wrong, you work at it. You also get to rate whether you think it's a piece of news, an opinion.
It's satire or fake. Yeah. Because there's so much there's so much stuff that's not actually fake news. It's just opinion. But, like, opinion isn't really labeled. Well, yeah. It seems like they used to they being media in general used to label whether a TV print opinion really clearly. That seems to get blurred a lot now, especially when you're sharing, via social media. And you actually could edit out if they've published it, you know, or if the publication listed as an opinion, you can edit that out as a user. So Right. Yeah. It's tough. That would be really helpful. Oh, I love it. So, obviously, everyone listening wants nutrition. They want a more nutritious news diet. You love it.
Where do they find this? Well, if you use the Chrome or Mozilla browsers, you can just search for nutrition in the, you know, in the little web store, and you can download it that way. You can also go to nutrition.com.
Oh, yes. Well done.
Yeah. Interestingly enough, nobody had that domain name. Crazy. Right?
You are so ahead of your times. I tell you. This is good. You're the one who created that website back in eighteen o four. Right? No. How did you know? That's what I used my time machine for. So, yeah. Very cool. Well, congratulations. This seems awesome. Definitely something that everyone should download. And while I have you here, we definitely need to do a plug for an event that we're working on together. Why don't you tell us what it is? Because I'll talk about it. Well, we're doing,
for the second year, we're doing a free speech online symposium in December. Exact date is December.
The future of speech online.
And this year's theme is communities online, which,
you know, I think that was your brainstorm. So was it? Yes. Yeah. I'll take credit. I mean, we have a team here that probably did more, but, you know, it's my podcast, so I'll take credit.
But I think that's very exciting to me because, like, so many of the issues that everybody talks about when it comes to speech online are about, communities and how they interact with each other and how, say, news within one community can go viral. Yeah. And one of the things I'm really interested to kind of unpack at this is
how communities can be such a great thing, but sometimes it leads to, oh, no, that negative term of filter bubbles and how sometimes a community can spread misinformation or false information. But sometimes they can do such wonderful things too. So making sure we get more of the good and less of the bad. It's an interesting conversation. And now I have one final question. Can you give us one more pun? Putting you on the spot. Oh my god. Yeah. It has to be in context. I'm ruining this. Right? Context, obviously. Well, alright. That's another episode. Oh, here she goes. No.
I can't I can't fail at this. You have no idea. I plan on entering, like, pun DMV in a couple of months. So the fact is Already that was good. So Pun DMV. Oh, Brian. You please edit this stuff out. Because if I think of a pun right now, I'll just I'll die. It's fine. Alright. I think it'll be so fun. It'll be like you, took three seconds. Okay. Thank you. And it just rolled off of my tongue. Context? Well, that was some real context because it was bad. And, Anything with the future of speech? No.
I totally just, like, sideswiped you with that one. I love it.
You did. This is the Gotcha Media. I see it. Oh my god.
But it's not live, so you're safe. Well, you know, after the future of speech event, we'll celebrate with a few drinks and we can speak easy somewhere. Oh, yes. I knew you had it. Lata, you never fail. I mean, you know, puns are inherently bad, but amazing. So, Lata, thank you so much for joining check Tech Talk, sharing your, insights on nutrition, and working with us on the future of speech online. Thanks for having me. CDT has powered up our work in student privacy. And one of the things we try to keep in mind with that work is that education is local. Today's guest knows that well. Teddy Hartman is the data privacy officer for the Howard County Public School System in Maryland, a system with over over 50,000 students and 8,000 employees. He joins us to share his firsthand experience in addressing student privacy. Welcome, Teddy. Hi. Welcome. Thank you. So first question. I'm gonna ask you a lot of questions about yourself and what you do. But first one, data privacy officer. Is this normal at most schools, or is Howard County kind of exceptional in this regard?
From what I gather, this is the exception. Okay. There are not many of me around. A few school systems are starting to get there now, but certainly among the first,
in the country. Cool. So tell me what it is that you do then.
So I manage, student privacy across the enterprise. So EdTech is a major, major part of that, but also our community partnerships, research approval, contracting. So it really is taking a broad look at privacy across the system, but then also a very deep look in certain areas, especially around technology. Cool. How did you get involved in privacy? What brought you to this job? A very interesting, kind of confluence of, fun factors. So I was a teacher for a long time, taught in Connecticut, taught in East LA, for years and years, moved out to DC. Did you teach? I taught English. Oh, awesome. High school English teacher. Moved out to DC to do an educational policy doctorate. And as part of that, worked with the Maryland state legislature on educational policy issues right around the time that student privacy became a thing. So twenty twelve, twenty thirteen. That experience trying to legislate around student privacy piqued my interest in the topic. And having been a teacher, I brought a lot of firsthand experience to what that really meant for teachers on the ground. From there, I got a policy fellowship in Howard County Schools. They said, hey. We hear this thing about privacy may be a thing. What do you know about it? I said, well, I happen to know quite a bit. I just worked on a law with the state legislature. One thing led to another, and we really just kind of grew a position organically.
Oh, that's great. Yeah. Fantastic. So what are you mentioned that this kind of really started to student privacy, ed tech really started to pop in 2012, 2013. What are some of the biggest changes you've seen in since that from then to kind of now?
Well, I think the initial round of privacy was very reactionary. Okay. Right? So it became this backlash against big data technology, just kind of gobbling up student data for for fun and for all the benefits that big data brought us in the consumer world. Get all the data. Right. I mean, it wasn't just ed education having that situation. Right. Like, everyone wanted it. Facebook, you know, data brokers. And so education got wrapped up in that. Yep. And then, at least from my perspective, there was an initial backlash. So there was a swing in the other direction. Right? Lock it down. This is scary. And so one of the big changes I've seen over the past couple years is kind of a coming back to a really strategic middle ground where we understand that privacy is a value, but we have lots of competing values in education. We want equity. We want access. Right? We wanna be able to provide kids the tools they need to succeed. We believe in certain pedagogical methods. So really seeing privacy as one of many factors that we're trying to balance versus this reactionary. It's either privacy or it's technology. It's no. We can actually think about lots of things together. Right? We can walk and chew gum at the same time, we hope.
Absolutely. And what about parents engagement? I mean, parents must be so, so important to this conversation, especially at the district level.
How do you think about engaging parents? How have their attitudes shifted a bit, towards data? Because, I mean, I can think of nothing more personal than data about your kid. Right. So in Howard County, we have a very interesting parent population because on one border of the county is the National Security Administration, NSA. Oh. It's Edward Snowden and I didn't even think of that. Cyber cyber spies. Right? So we have a contingent of parents who are actually government contractors who come to me and say, you know, we can hack your system. Like, yeah, you probably can. Wow. And then on the on the more rural side of the county, we have a a group of very privacy minded parents who are skeptical of government having too much information about their students. So I found that the best way to engage is just to be transparent. We had a two year process in Howard County where we engaged public stakeholders multiple times in a policy process. We got lots of input from the PTA, from the community advisory, from the special ed advisory group, from businesses in the community to really develop what our stance as a county is and how does that align with federal and state, where do we go above and beyond, how do we navigate some of those tensions. So for me, it was really about actively trying to incorporate parents. And then once we built out some of our practices, we have websites and we have school messengers, and teachers put things on their home pages. And so we really do have an ongoing dialogue with our with our community.
That's really great. NSA, I can't imagine having to have NSA parents, like, as the people as your test case or as the people that are cut. Wow. On your policy committee. Wow. You have a hard job. I mean, I already respect you, but now I've just kicked it up a notch. So earlier you mentioned that Howard County is fairly exceptional in terms of having the position, that you have. I I'm guessing that some of that is just a capacity. Some districts may not have the financial resources,
or even the expertise that they can kind of identify or pluck. Do you have any thoughts on ways that schools and districts can build kind of this privacy capacity in house if maybe it isn't hiring the equivalent of you? Like, we can't clone you to send you to all the school districts. But yeah. That's a great question. And one something that I really enjoy about my job is when other school systems, especially within Maryland or even across the country, call me, they've seen me at a conference or met me somewhere and say, Teddy, we're trying to start this. What do we do? And my and my recommendation is always to think about really kind of scope and sequence from the beginning because privacy can become so unmanageable and just seems so overwhelming when you start to peel back those layers. Like, oh my gosh. It's in our partnership agreements. It's in our research agreements. It's in it's over here in our transportation system. And so my recommendation is always pick something, you know, whether it's for most people, it's around the use of educational technology. That's usually the first place most people start. And so for me, that's always my advice. If you have limited capacity, pick really one element you can start to figure out. And if that's around vetting of EdTech, then great. And then you can move on to a new one. But to look at it and go, oh my gosh. It's everywhere. Then that just becomes overwhelming. People go, oh, can't do it. Too hard. Can't do it. Too hard. Too too too hard. Too big. So that's and I've been working with a lot of school systems, in Maryland on exactly that. You know? And I think also too to to reach out to the school systems that do have, someone like me or or Baltimore County or Houston or some other really big school systems that have websites and a lot of these things out in policy. We're all public organizations. Beg, borrow, steal. You know, download my download our policy and then see if you can pass it in your county. You know? That's great.
So let's go a little bit into, ed tech and vetting of ed tech. What are some of the, things that you would advise people think about when they're vetting ed tech? So the way I approach ed tech, is to
divide the waters between what we consider essential and supplemental tools. So we have 30 different curriculum coordinators and 70 principals. So we've got a 100 people in Howard County who can really select something that they wanna purchase Okay. For the school system. And so for those, we have a very strict vetting process because we wanna make sure not only does it align to our privacy policy, but that it it works. So I might review it from a policy perspective. The curriculum folks want it for a curricular perspective, but then our technology department needs to make sure it actually plugs into our ecosystem and does Mhmm. What it says it's gonna do. So for those, we have a a really robust vetting process, but the upside of that is that we are very confident in sharing student data with those companies. The benefit is that our school system decides this is how we wanna operate. We wanna run we wanna have a learning management platform. We wanna have guidance counselor software. We wanna have, you know, certain tools available for equity purposes to everyone. And so we contract, and then we share student data. Under federal and state law, we don't allow parents to opt out of those. About 30 digital tools in that bucket. Okay. Then we have a whole separate set, which are supplemental. All the fun little stuff teachers see at a conference, kind of goofing around and Why mix into the classroom? Right. They just wanna do really vibrant and and fun things and innovative things. I review those from a from a privacy perspective, and then teachers have to allow their students to opt out. Well, that technically will allow the parents to opt out. So those are a different bucket. They go through a much smaller review because I there's 7,000 teachers and one of me. Right.
That's very cool. No. That's a good way to think about it. And having that innovation in the classroom, I'm sure the teachers enjoy Yep. Not just a lockdown, no, you can't do that approach to it. Right. What's the one or two things that you are most proud about in your time with Howard County Public Schools?
So two things I would say. One is is getting the policy passed, to thread that needle between the very tech savvy government contract parents and the very government get out of my business parents. To to thread that needle, I think, was a big success. It took us two years. A thousand take one. Ended up taking two. But to get that on the books, was a big win. I think the other thing that I I really am am proud about is the fact that we have gotten a lot of kind of cross functional teams together. So very closely with our instructional technology folks and people on the ground with teachers, our library media specialists, lots of people who are early adopters of digital technology, in education, and then also our operations, risk management. So this building kind of what I call fusion teams together to kind of create some synergy around this field has been has been really great because we get a bunch of people together. We can make decisions,
and then people understand how really enterprise wide that issue is. Yeah. It sounds like a lot of good lessons people can take from what you've done there. Double the time and engage a lot of people, which is great. One one last question. I know I just lied. You also wear tons of other hats. What are some of the other cool things that you're working on, outside of this very cool
role? Outside of this very cool role, I'm also a doctoral student in educational policy. I sit on the advisory board of South by Southwest EDU. I do a lot of speaking around technology and privacy.
The new dad and an eight month old baby. Congratulations. Probably the biggest headwear.
Right? Absolutely. So I'm not very well slept, but,
but lots of fun. Well, I couldn't tell. So congratulations on all those fronts. Duddy, thanks so much for joining Tech Talk. We learned a ton, and, hopefully, you can share this podcast with some of the folks, and they can learn from it too. Absolutely. Would love it. Alright. That's it for this episode of Tech Talk. If you're interested in attending the future of speech online, you can find all the information at cdt.org. You can also get great updates on CDT's work on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. I'm Brian Waslowski. Thanks for listening.
