January 28th marks Data Privacy Day, an international day dedicated to raising awareness of privacy and secure data processing. The day is rooted in a fundamental principle of data protection law worldwide: individuals should have control and view over their personal data and be protected against misuse, unauthorized access, and unlawful processing.
For children and students, this principle is especially critical. They are a vulnerable user group with limited ability to understand the long-term consequences of how their data is collected, shared, and used. For school owners and municipalities, Data Privacy Day serves as an important reminder at a time when digital learning tools, AI-enabled functionality, and increased data sharing create both new opportunities and greater responsibility.
Children and students are among the most vulnerable data subjects in society. In today’s digital school environment, parents, staff, and communities expect school owners – public and private – to maintain control and oversight.
This means ensuring that personal data is processed lawfully, securely, and in a way that consistently prioritizes the best interests of the children.
Data Privacy Day highlights four core principles:
Supervisory audits and regulatory findings across several countries show a recurring pattern: many school owners lack sufficient routines for assessing, documenting, and governing digital learning tools. This is rarely due to unwillingness, but rather to complex regulatory requirements and an increasingly fragmented vendor ecosystem.
Common findings include:
A common misconception is that secure authentication or access control alone is sufficient. While identity and access management systems play an important role, they only address the point of entry. Once users are authenticated, large volumes of student data may still be processed by multiple vendors – processing that school owners remain fully responsible for governing, documenting, and controlling.
Data Privacy Day therefore provides a natural opportunity to pause, review existing practices, and ensure that governance and documentation reflect the actual level of risk.
AI introduces new requirements in 2026
An increasing number of digital learning tools are embedding generative AI features, often without school owners having full visibility into which data is used, how it is processed, or what assessments were conducted beforehand. At the same time, new regulatory frameworks, such as the EU AI Act, introduce significantly stronger requirements for risk assessment, transparency, and documentation.
For school owners, this is not only a legal challenge, but also an ethical one. More schools are questioning how to use AI in a way that is good for teaching and follows ethical rules. There is also growing scrutiny of whether the tools and vendors in use align with institutional values and ethical guidelines.
When technology can influence students’ learning, evaluation, and development, it becomes essential to assess more than functionality alone.
School owners must therefore address:
Edudata.io is designed to support school owners and local authorities in managing these challenges by bringing together data protection, information security, AI risk, accessibility challenges, and ethical considerations within a single structured framework.
Rather than treating privacy, security, and AI as separate disciplines, the platform connects them within one unified risk assessment and governance process. This reduces fragmentation, clarifies accountability, and supports more informed decision-making.
In addition, the service helps clarify responsibilities related to privacy, security, and AI governance, making it easier to adopt new learning technology in a safe, documented, and auditable manner.
The framework is flexible: school owners can define and include their own risk areas based on local needs, organizational context, or specific challenges. This ensures assessments remain relevant in practice.
Did you know? Edudata.io is the only service that automatically meets the transparency obligations set by legislation. The Edudata.io Privacy App is an application for students that provides a real-time view of educational tools and the personal data used within them, while also simplifying and automating data requests for end-users.
To operationalize this approach, the Edudata.io supports:
In practice, this gives school owners something many currently lack: a single governance view that shows where risks exist and how they can be managed.
Data Privacy Day is not about passwords or cookie banners. For schools and local authorities, it is about protecting children’s rights and ensuring that digital technology is used in a safe, responsible, and trustworthy way.
School owners who take this responsibility seriously need clear processes, reliable documentation, and governance tools that reflect today’s risk landscape. Edudata is built to support that work, making it more structured, transparent, and sustainable.
2026 will be a year of significant change in the educational technology landscape. Data Privacy Day offers a natural starting point to ensure those changes are implemented in a lawful, ethical, and trust-building way.
Contact us today, and let's look at how the risk management works!