These Parents Built a School App. Then the City Called the Cops

Stockholm's official app was a disaster. So annoyed parents built their own open source version -- ignoring warnings that it might be illegal. From a report: Commissioned in 2013, Skolplattform was intended to make the lives of up to 500,000 children, teachers, and parents in Stockholm easier -- acting as the technical backbone for all things education, from registering attendance to keeping a record of grades. The platform is a complex system that's made up of three different parts, containing 18 individual modules that are maintained by five external companies. The sprawling system is used by 600 preschools and 177 schools, with separate logins for every teacher, student, and parent. The only problem? It doesn't work. The Skolplattform, which has cost more than 1 billion Swedish Krona, SEK, ($117 million), has failed to match its initial ambition. Parents and teachers have complained about the complexity of the system -- its launch was delayed, there have been reports of project mismanagement, and it has been labelled an IT disaster. The Android version of the app has an average 1.2 star rating. On October 23, 2020, Landgren, a developer and the CEO of Swedish innovation consulting firm Iteam, tweeted a hat design emblazoned with the words "Skrota Skolplattformen" -- loosely translated as "trash the school platform." He joked he should wear the hat when he picks his children up from school. Weeks later, wearing that very hat, he decided to take matters into his own hands. "From my own frustration, I just started to create my own app," Landgren says. He wrote to city officials asking to see the Skolplattform's API documents. While waiting for a response, he logged into his account and tried to work out whether the system could be reverse-engineered. In just a few hours, he had created something that worked. "I had information on my screen from the school platform," he says. "And then I started building an API on top of their lousy API." The work started at the end of November 2020, just days after Stockholm's Board of Education was hit with a 4 million SEK GDPR fine for "serious shortcomings" in the Skolplattform. Integritetsskyddsmyndigheten, Sweden's data regulator, had found serious flaws in the platform that had exposed the data of hundreds of thousands of parents, children, and teachers. In some cases, people's personal information could be accessed from Google searches. (The flaws have since been fixed and the fine reduced on appeal.) In the weeks that followed, Landgren teamed up with fellow developers and parents Johan Obrink and Erik Hellman, and the trio hatched a plan. They would create an open source version of the Skolplattform and release it as an app that could be used by frustrated parents across Stockholm. Building on Landgren's earlier work, the team opened Chrome's developer tools, logged into the Skolplattform, and wrote down all the URLs and payloads. They took the code, which called the platform's private API and built packages so it could run on a phone -- essentially creating a layer on top of the existing, glitchy Skolplattform. The result was the Oppna Skolplattformen, or Open School Platform. The app was released on February 12, 2021, and all of its code is published under an open source license on GitHub. Anyone can take or use the code, with very few limitations on what they can do with it. If the city wanted to use any of the code, it could. But rather than welcome it with open arms, city officials reacted with indignation. Even before the app was released, the City of Stockholm warned Landgren that it might be illegal. In the eight months that followed, Stockholms Stad, or the City of Stockholm, attempted to derail and shut down the open source app. It warned parents to stop using the app and alleged that it might be illegally accessing people's personal information. Officials reported the app to data protection authorities and, Landgren claims, tweaked the official system's underlying code to stop the spin-off from operating at all.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

from Slashdot https://ift.tt/3o7CT7U

Share on FacebookPlus on Google+

SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER