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

Platforms start to play a vital role in the realization of public values like privacy, also in public education. This manifests itself for example in the process of making arrangements between schools and platforms about the protection of personal data. However, as a result of a growing power imbalance, schools find it difficult to impose instructions on the platforms and to get sufficient guarantees for the security of the data during these negotiations, which influences the schools’ governance. 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 allocation of responsibilities between platforms and users, supported by a legal and policy framework created by state institutions. Qualitative interviews 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 functioned as a driving force for strengthening data protection. The public education sector organizes themselves, and extensively cooperates with both state institutions and platform companies in order to improve data protection. 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 responsibilities between them.