https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/02/education/learning/school-websites-information-tracking.html
The home page of Pinellas County Schools in Florida is brimming with information for families, students, staff members and the public: an easy-to-use dashboard of news, shortcuts and links to the district’s Facebook page, Twitter feed and YouTube channel.
But Pinellas’s home page has been supplying information to another audience, an unseen one, as well this year. An array of tracking scripts were embedded in the site, designed to install snippets of computer code into the browsers of anyone clicking on it, to report their visits or track their movements as they traveled around the web.
The trackers were detected last winter during a study by Douglas Levin, a Washington-based expert on educational technology. Asked about them in April, the district expressed surprise and said it would have them removed. But Mr. Levin found 22 trackers when he checked back last month.
By E.K. Moore
