Tech roundup: No data protection for Brazilian public school students

Welcome to our Tech Roundup, where we bring you Brazil’s biggest stories in technology and innovation. This week: Public school students had their data sent to advertising companies by government platforms – the biggest victims of cybercrimes in Brazil, says a Tenable survey

No data protection for Brazilian public school students

Brazilian state and municipal government education platforms routinely sent data on public school students to advertising companies last year, according to a study released last week by the organization Human Rights Watch (HRW). 

The case. The HRW survey says that the Education Media Center of São Paulo city hall, and Estude em Casa, created by the Minas Gerais state education secretariat, extracted data from students and sent them to third-party companies during 2022, using tracking technologies for advertising.

• HRW said that the agency responsible for the São Paulo educational website did not respond to its requests for clarification. The agency told the press that it was acting in accordance with the General Data Protection Law.
• The website based in Minas Gerais removed ad tracking in March 2023, after the state’s education secretariat was notified twice by HRW. However, the agency did not respond when asked about the possibility that data collection had occurred without its knowledge.
• Although the narratives of the parties involved do not clarify what happened in the case of the data of public school students in Brazil, the episode shows an urgent need for changes in the mindset of the country’s government agencies.

The target. A recent study by Tenable, a cybersecurity exposure management platform, showed that...