The Ministry of Education Wants to Collect Students' Personal Information

Illustrative (created using AI)

Ahead of the next school year, the Ministry of Education is requiring that there be a direct interface between the pedagogical management software used by schools and the Ministry of Education. These software systems are intended for use by schools and contain private, personal, and sensitive information, including behavioral issues, learning difficulties, tardiness and absences, and disciplinary incidents. The Ministry of Education has now instructed the software providers to enable it to automatically extract all information contained in the systems starting with the coming school year. In addition to the automatic transfer of information, the Ministry of Education has also significantly tightened the software’s reporting requirements: for example, it required teachers to submit reports every two hours, starting at 9 a.m., on student absences and nonattendance in each and every class, as well as nightly reports on behavioral incidents. 

On May 12, 2026, ACRI, together with the Privacy Clinic at Tel Aviv University, submitted an urgent appeal to the Ministry of Education demanding the cancellation of these requirements. In the appeal, Attorneys Noa Diamond from the Privacy Clinic and Tal Hassin from ACRI emphasized the serious violation of students’ fundamental rights resulting from the software update, foremost among them the right to privacy. The Ministry’s demand to collect information and receive it automatically is unlawful, an overreach of its authority, and harms administrative autonomy. Moreover, if the Ministry seeks to conduct close personal monitoring of 2.5 million students and tens of thousands of teachers, it must regulate this through legislation. 

As the appeal states: 

“The practice that the Ministry is now attempting to establish — creating a monitoring infrastructure for information on an enormous, detailed, and complex scale regarding the behavior of citizens and residents, and minors in particular — is a practice characteristic of totalitarian regimes whose essence is the supervision, surveillance, and control of citizens. This is not a merely theoretical concern: by establishing the requested database, the Ministry is creating a ‘personal file’ for each student, to be managed by the Ministry itself, which may accompany them throughout their lives, whether the information is later transferred upon request or leaked from a breached database. The publication of the new standard was not accompanied by any procedure governing the retention, destruction, or time limitation of the information. In any event, such procedures would not legitimize the Ministry’s collection of the information, but their absence further demonstrates the harmful haste with which this measure was carried out.” 

Appeal by ACRI and the Privacy Clinic, May 12, 2026 (Heb) 

The appeal was written with the assistance of legal intern Saly May