[Congressional Record Volume 147, Number 18 (Thursday, February 8, 2001)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1221-S1222]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

      By Mr. DODD (for himself and Mr. Shelby):
  S. 290. A bill to increase parental involvement and protect student 
privacy; to the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions.
  Mr. DODD. Mr. President, I rise to introduce the Student Privacy 
Protection Act with my friend and colleague from Alabama, Senator 
Shelby. Senator Shelby recently asked me to join him as a co-chair of 
the Congressional Privacy Caucus and I am pleased that we are today 
introducing legislation to help protect the privacy of one of America's 
most vulnerable groups-- our students.
  A recent GAO report confirms that more and more, schools are being 
perceived by some not just as centers for learning, but as centers for 
commercial research. Our children should be instilled with knowledge, 
not mined for knowledge on their commercial preferences and interests. 
Schools are there to help children grow up to be good citizens--not to 
provide a captive audience for market researchers and major 
advertisers.
  Our bill is simple--it provides parents and their children with 
modest, appropriate, privacy protections from market research in 
schools that would gather personal information about students, during 
school hours, for purely commercial purposes. It does not ban 
advertising, nor does it ban market research. It simply requires that, 
before a researcher can start asking a young student to provide 
personal information, that researcher must obtain parental consent or 
its equivalent.
  Surely, that is not too much to ask. If someone came to your home and 
started to ask your child about his or her age, gender, neighborhood, 
food

[[Page S1222]]

preferences, and entertainment preferences, surely you would want to 
know the purpose of such questions before deciding whether to consent 
to them. We think parents and children are entitled to no less 
consideration just because a child is in school.
  This is part of a larger phenomenon that is familiar to anyone who 
has walked through a school in the past few years--the stunning 
increase in commercial advertising in schools. Gone are the days when 
commercial advertising simply meant the local hardware store's name on 
the basketball scoreboard or the local dry-cleaner's name on the 
football scoreboard.
  Schools, teachers and their students are daily barraged with 
commercial messages aimed at influencing the buying habits of children 
and their parents. A 1997 study from Texas A&M, estimated that 
children, age 4 to 12, spent more than $24 billion themselves and 
influenced their parents to spend $187 billion.
  One major spaghetti sauce firm has encouraged science teachers to 
have their students test different sauces for thickness as part of 
their science classes. A cable television channel in New Jersey had 
elementary school students fill our a 27-page booklet called ``My All 
About Me Journal'' as part of a marketing survey. In one school, a 
student was suspended for wearing a Pepsi T-shirt on the school's Coke 
Day. In another, credit card applications were sent home with 
elementary school students for their parents and the school collected a 
fee for every family that signed up.
  Advertisers focus on students and schools for the same reason Willie 
Sutton robbed banks--because that's where the money is. And many 
schools enter into commercial contracts with advertisers because, as 
the GAO found, they are strapped for cash. Schools often are faced with 
two poor choices--provide computers, books, and other educational and 
recreational equipment with commercial advertising, or not at all.
  The bill that Senator Shelby and I offer today does not second guess 
the hard decisions that school administrators are making each and every 
day. Nor does it ignore the fact that business leaders often are the 
strongest advocates for school improvement and the greatest benefactors 
of the educational process. What it does is address what the GAO report 
considers to be perhaps the most troubling form of commercial activity 
in schools--the ``growing phenomenon'' of market research.
  According to GAO, ``none of the education officials we interviewed 
said schools were appropriate venues for market research. . . .'' 
Nevertheless, none of the districts surveyed by GAO had policies 
specifically addressing market research and the GAO found that this 
activity is widespread. One firm alone has conducted market research in 
more than 1,000 schools.
  Another company, which since has discontinued these activities, 
provided computers to 1,800 schools, about 8.6 percent of all U.S. 
secondary schools. In exchange, the company was allowed to advertise to 
and ask questions of students using these computers. There are other 
examples. Suffice it to say that this is a practice that not only is 
inappropriate in the opinion of education officials, but is unknown to 
many parents. Nearly half of parents in a recent survey were not aware 
that websites can collect personal information about students without 
their knowledge.
  This bill would return to parents the right to protect their 
children's privacy. It's simple, it's modest, it contains appropriate 
exceptions, and it's our hope that it will become law together with 
other educational reforms being considered by this Congress.
  Mr. SHELBY. Mr. President, I rise today with my colleague Senator 
Dodd to introduce the ``Student Privacy Protection Act''. This 
legislation is intended to ensure that parents have the ability to 
protect their children's privacy by requiring that anyone who wishes to 
collect data for commercial purposes from kids in school must first 
seek and obtain parental permission.
  The need for this legislation stems from the fact that a large number 
of marketing companies are going into classrooms and using class time 
to gather personal information about students and their families for 
commercial gain. In many cases, parents are not even aware that these 
companies have entered their children's school, much less that they are 
exploiting them in the one place they should be the safest, their 
classroom.
  Our legislation builds on a long line of privacy legislation to 
protect kids, such as the Family Educational Rights Act, the Children's 
Online Privacy Protection Act and the Protection of Pupil Rights Act. 
The goal of these laws, as is the case with our legislation, is to 
ensure that the privacy of children is protected and that their 
personal information cannot be collected and/or disseminated without 
the prior knowledge, and in most cases, consent of the parents.
  We understand that schools today are financially strapped and many of 
these companies offer enticing financial incentives to gain access. Our 
goal is not to make it more difficult for schools to access the 
educational materials and the computers that they so desperately need. 
Rather our goal is to ensure that the details of these arrangements are 
disclosed and that parents are allowed to participate in the decision-
making process.
  The bottom line here is that parents have a right and a 
responsibility to be involved in their children's education. Much of 
what is occurring now is being done at the expense of the parents' 
decision making authority because schools are allowing companies direct 
access to students. This legislation enhances parental involvement by 
giving them an opportunity to decide for themselves who does and does 
not get access to their children during the school day.
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