Seattle (and nearby towns)' school systems asked thousands of students age 10 to 12 to fill out intimate questionnaires, collected from the students by a for-profit company.

The article disregards, of course, the injustice of leading students to run nonfree software. The author is not aware of that underlying issue which affects all school computing. See https://gnu.org/education/.

The US government criterion for whether anonymized data that is "identifiable" is too lax. Even if a "a reasonable person in the school community" could not determine who a record is about, very likely Google or Palantir could.

There is another side to this issue. Students entered information about important personal problems such as using drugs and bullying. Offering the students no help wouldn't be a good alternative. What is the right way to offer such students help with proper confidentiality?