

Balderas said that Congress had failed to enact modern, meaningful data protections for students while regulators had failed to hold ed tech firms accountable for flouting student data privacy and security. “There has really been an epic failure,” said Hector Balderas, the attorney general of New Mexico, whose office has sued tech companies for violating the privacy of children and students. At a moment when some education technology companies have amassed sensitive information on millions of school children, they say, safeguards for student data seem wholly inadequate.

Although it was not the largest hack on an ed tech company, these experts say they are troubled by the nature and scope of the data breach - which, in some cases, involved delicate personal details about students or student data dating back more than a decade. Now some cybersecurity and privacy experts say that the cyberattack on Illuminate Education amounts to a warning for industry and government regulators.
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As these student-tracking systems have spread, however, so have cyberattacks on school software vendors - including a recent hack that affected Chicago Public Schools, the nation’s third-largest district. The intent of such tools is well meaning: to help educators identify and intervene with at-risk students. Over the last decade, tech companies and education reformers have pushed schools to adopt software systems that can catalog and categorize students’ classroom outbursts, absenteeism and learning challenges.
