From personalized tutoring to instant grading, AI promises to supercharge Indian education. Yet, as tools like handwritten answer scanners proliferate, whispers of privacy erosion grow louder.
A chorus of UN bodies warns of AI’s appetite for children’s data, demanding fortified privacy measures in educational tech.
PowerSchool’s US fiasco—exposing 60 million students’ intimate details in a single breach—serves as a cautionary tale for global edtech.
In India, the threat is immediate: schools weathered 200,000 cyberattacks and 400,000 breaches in under a year, a pilot probe discloses.
Pratham and Anthropic’s joint venture births ATM, a Claude-driven innovator that converts scribbles to digital, builds aligned tests, grades smartly, and feeds back in dual languages.
Enter the DPDP Act’s guardianship clause: no child data processing without parents’ provable nod. Upcoming rules detail tech like OTPs tied to official IDs.
The hitch? Families might not grasp the full pipeline—from snapshot to overseas AI crunching. Such blind spots invite breaches and erode trust.
The path forward demands vigilance: mandatory disclosures, consent innovations, and DPDP-aligned designs. Only then can AI uplift without undermining India’s young minds.