Edsby apologized to any student who “feels outed”.
Fuck you, Edsby.
Edsby takes your student data security very seriously
Gotta love it when companies say this immediately after proving they don’t.
It’s wild that as soon as the government allows you to discriminate against trans kids that these companies don’t even waste a single minute.
Run by vile, hateful individuals masquerading as people.
So it was working properly and now it’s not? Sounds like a classic case of deploying to production before testing and verification. Edsby is taking responsibility, so it seems reasonable to think that they are not adhering to one of the fundamental rules for software development and deployment. What other shortcuts are they taking. No test suites? Not encrypted at rest? Not encrypted in transit? No authorization and authentication process? No access logs? This could well be the tip of the iceberg and should trigger an investigation that includes a third party aaudit of policies and procedures. At their expense, of course.
It’s a big problem in schools, in general. Schools have basically no budget for IT. As a substitute teacher, I’m regularly deadnaming students because attendance lists can only be printed with LegalName. It sucks.
But I also dabble on the tech side of the education sector, and it’s embarrassing how far behind student information systems are, in general:
- No API access to anything, so everything is done by .CSV file.
- No databases, nor training in how to use them, so massive student datasets are emailed around in spreadsheets.
- Teachers leave their systems logged in with access to the entire district’s networked drives system.
- Districts are running everything on prod with no backups.
I could go on.
But schools are never given the budget to hire experts to do these things right, nor the budget to get the hardware they need for robust testing environments and backups.
This sounds like it could have been this contractor deploying without sufficient testing, but it could just as easily be the province’s contractor changing the student data portal and breaking everything.
Of course it’s like that. Why would anyone properly fund a school? Drives me nuts.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A tech company is apologizing after trans students were “outed” to their classmates because of an data error that affected eight school divisions in Saskatchewan.
She immediately started making calls, trying to figure out how to have the names corrected and learn who was responsible.
Edsby takes your student data security very seriously and supports your preference to identify as you choose," said a company spokesperson in a written statement.
The glitch occurred on Aug. 10, 2023, but Edsby did not learn of the problem until Thursday, when students began noticing issues and the company was called out.
The Edsby spokesperson said the company “regrets the poor timing of this issue, given Saskatchewan’s new parental consent requirements.”
On Tuesday, Saskatchewan’s education minister announced a new policy dictating that students under the age of 16 who want to change their pronouns or names must obtain parental consent.
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