Protecting Students: Data Privacy Policy in India and Indonesia

• In Event: Poster Session Group 7
  In Poster Session: Protecting Students: Data Privacy Policy in India and Indonesia

Proposal

This poster presentation analyzes student data privacy in India and Indonesia's policies. This poster also aims to examine their implications on students and the needs of key stakeholders like parents, teachers, and private ed-tech companies to inform future ICT policies.

This poster will explore the following questions:

- What is the current policy framework for student data privacy in India and Indonesia?
- What is the impact of lack of student data privacy on students?
- What are the needs of key stakeholders related to data privacy, and how can these be used to inform future policies?

Students' right to privacy is acknowledged in Article 16 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. This need is more urgent today because more than 1 billion students are connected to the internet for remote education programs as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic (UNICEF, 2020). This fact increases students’ risks because the online world has created new forms of abuse and exploitation.

This presentation will use secondary data analysis of policy papers, literature, reports, and case studies, to review policies in India and Indonesia, where student data privacy is still an emerging area of attention. In this presentation, we compare and contrast the policy mechanism of India and Indonesia in protecting student data privacy. We focus on India because India is the second most lucrative market for educational technology. However, its data protection regulation for students is inadequate, while Indonesia is an emerging ed-tech market with little to no data protection for students. The presentation will use case studies to highlight the widening gap between the on-ground reality and the existing policy framework for protecting students.

In India, students' data is protected under the Personal Data Protection Bill, 2019. The Bill puts heavy restrictions around the use of students' personal data in schools, universities, educational organizations, and ed-tech companies. However, this policy still puts non-personal data at risk, and does not safeguard or penalize in the event of a data breach. On the other hand, in Indonesia, presently no law explicitly regulates data protection of students. However, the country is passing its first Personal Data Protection law (PDP Law), which will serve as the framework for citizens’ data privacy. It remains unclear how the PDP Law will impact student data privacy. Moreover, since it is built on the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), it is not known if it will meet the needs of key stakeholders in Indonesia.

The poster aims to take a socio-cultural view of policymaking and highlight on-ground realities through case studies. Currently, what is 'known' about student data privacy is derived from experiences of highly developed countries, and it may or may not be relevant to developing countries like India and Indonesia (World Bank, 2016). Thus, by examining their current realities and needs, this poster aims to generate collective knowledge about what works in student data privacy in their context and inform the development of policies to make them more relevant and impactful.

Authors

• Deepali Barapatre, University of Pennsylvania

• Muhamad Nuzul, University of Pennsylvania