Naviance was just one part of the college application process for millions of high school students. It was a place to plan your future, keep track of deadlines, and see how your GPA stacked up against other students from your school who had also applied. It felt like normal, almost administrative work. It looks like something else was going on in the background.
Electric School Holdings, Hobsons Inc., Heap Inc., and the Chicago Board of Education have all agreed to pay $17.25 million to settle a class action lawsuit. The main claim was that students’ communications and activity on the Naviance platform were being spied on and tracked without their permission while they were looking into colleges. The defendants say they did nothing wrong, but they agreed to settle instead of going to court for what would probably be years and cost a lot of money.
A number of laws are being used as examples in the lawsuits. These include the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the California Invasion of Privacy Act, the Illinois Eavesdropping Act, the Stored Communications Act, and the Illinois School Student Records Act. That’s a long list that shows how many levels of student privacy law could have been affected. When one piece of educational technology affects so many laws at once, it’s hard not to notice that the data practices behind it were probably more complicated than any parent or student ever thought.
Who is eligible? If you were a student in the US and used Naviance at least once between August 18, 2021, and January 23, 2026, you might be able to get a piece of the settlement fund. The distribution is pro rata, which means that each eligible claimant gets an equal share of the money that is left over after lawyers’ fees, administrative costs, and a service award are paid out. How much each person gets will depend on how many valid claims are made.
Besides the money, the settlement makes some important changes to the way things are built. It has been agreed that PowerSchool will set up a Web Governance Committee to look into how analytics and advertising technologies are used in Naviance. The company has promised for two years that certain third-party tools, such as those from Google, Microsoft, Heap, and Hotjar, will not be added to the platform for students unless the committee gives the go-ahead. It seems almost silly that a governance committee is needed to decide if the tech tools used on a platform for student learning are legal. Some might say that question should have been answered before the tools were used.
You can also delete data as part of the deal. Heap, Google, Microsoft, and Hotjar have been told to get rid of all student data that is relevant to the class period. Heap has a tight deadline: the primary data has to be turned in ten days after the final judgment, and the backup data has to be turned in thirty. If deletion really does happen on that scale is a practical question that settlements rarely answer clearly, but the duty is now in the public record.
As a co-defendant, Chicago Public Schools has agreed to make its vendor contracts stronger going forward by requiring third parties to certify every year in writing that they are following a list of federal and state laws about student privacy. It’s the kind of accountability system that every district that handles a lot of student data should probably have in place. The fact that it took a lawsuit to get here shows how carelessly those duties have been handled in the past.
As we see more cases like this one, it seems like the ed-tech industry has grown faster than the laws and morals that were meant to guide it. Naviance isn’t a niche item. It’s a big part of how college counselors at thousands of schools do their jobs. The students who used it weren’t choosing to join a data ecosystem; they were just looking for places to apply.
The settlement hasn’t been approved by the court yet. If you got a notice or think you might be eligible, you should check out the official settlement website. There may be a bigger effect on how ed-tech companies handle the data of minors in the future than the amount of money paid out. This is true whether the payout is fifty dollars or five hundred dollars.
