Public education, platformization and cooperative responsibility: the case of the Privacy Covenant in the Netherlands

Platformization increasingly changes educational pedagogies, policies, gov-ernance, financing, and the role of teachers in public education. As such, platforms start to play a vital role in the realization of the values and socie-tal goals of public education. Platform governance typically focuses on the responsibility of one actor. Cooperative responsibility argues that instead, platform governance should be the result of the dynamic interaction and al-location of responsibilities between platforms and users, supported by a le-gal and policy framework created by state institutions. Qualitative inter-views into the construction of the Privacy Covenant for public education in the Netherlands are used as a case to investigate cooperative responsibility ‘on the ground’. The findings show that the Privacy Covenant has func-tioned as a driving force for strengthening data protection. The public edu-cation sector organizes themselves, and extensively cooperates with both state institutions and platform companies in order to improve data protec-tion. Many of these stakeholders take more responsibility in protecting the privacy of children and keep on collaborating for the ongoing improvement of data protection. In this collaboration, schools should take into account an observed diversity in platforms which influences the distribution of re-sponsibilities between them.

Trefwoorden:Cooperative responsibility; data protection; platformization; public education, Data protection, Platformisation, Public education