A reader offers these comments:
“Teachers are ‘free’ to teach ‘personally’ “… that is if we and our kids are willing to sell their identity for products and to data consolidators.
We need to stop web-based education. Period. Dangerous stuff. Incorrect and manipulated numbers that will cause kids to fail, teachers to be fired, schools to close, communities to wither…
Financial and societal costs that we can’t begin to imagine.
I am reading a book titled “I Know Who You Are And I Saw What You Did; Social Networks and the Death of Privacy.” Commercial enterprises are all looking for data to mine and sell–even if it has nothing to do with their so-called product.
For example, MyEdu (a virtual counselor for higher education) claims to help the student “Manage college. Get your degree faster.
Land the perfect job or internship. It’s FREE! forever!)
https://www.myedu.com/students/
Check out their privacy policy. https://www.myedu.com/about/myedu/privacy/
It doesn’t matter that their claims selling their education snake oil would never be brought to a court of law. Heck! That’s corporate free speech to hawk garbage and make claims…
Margaret Spellings (former US Secretary of Education and now on MyEdu’s Board was right when she said,“It’s a gold mine of data.”
http://www.statesman.com/news/news/local/ut-system-sought-quick-wins-with-myedu-partnership/nRkBj/
All the data can be sold to data consolidators like, Aexiom (described by former CEO John Meyer as “the biggest company you have never heard of”) and LexisNexis (which bought competitor ChoicePoint for $4.1 billion in cash).
We have electronic avatars that negatively impact our real selves. Spokeo is a website that is loaded with errors that employers and potential landlords use.
While the internet seemed like the perfect tool for democracy, Eli Pariser (“The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding from You”) wrote, “Personalization has given us something very different: a public sphere sorted and manipulated by algorithms, fragmented by design, and hostile to dialogue.”
Great to know this website exists! Blogs and News on Data Mining, Web Mining and Text Mining
http://www.kdnuggets.com/websites/blogs.html
From this link, I see a new one posted on JAN 10, 2013.
Smart TV and Data Mining “data mining coming to our home…” http://www.aboutdm.com
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Which is why I ask, Pearson comes to teacher education and we are supposed to be cool with that?
http://atthechalkface.com/2013/02/04/pearson-comes-to-teacher-education-and-we-are-supposed-to-be-cool-with-that/
I have been following some blogs and what I can surmise is that our young are commodities traded on Wall Street. So, punish the “so-called” failing schools by closing them down and the cycle continues. After all, this is about greed. In the meanwhile our children, teachers, and parents suffer (except for the rich)…so American, so Wall Street, and so political. I’ve been reading some of the information on charter schools, … and finding out they are not the solution. No privatization of our public schools! No more testing! And what?….the National Governors Association are responsible for the common standards? Politicians and lobbyists is definitely a marriage made in heaven.
The Gates-funded corporation that will collect confidential student data from 9 states, without parental consent, including NY, and will store it on a cloud and disclose it to commercial vendors, just announced it’s launch yesterday. It’s called inBloom Inc., and in its privacy & security policy announced that it“ cannot guarantee the security of the information stored in inBloom or that the information will not be intercepted when it is being transmitted” to others.. http://shar.es/Y1VnU
inBloom is a great source for virtual schools to select their victims!
Here’s one database very few know about. Thanks MSNBC for your investigative report.
Little Known Database Sells Millions of American’s Salary Information to Debt Collectors (and others)
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/01/30/little-known-database-sells-millions-of-americans-salary-information-to-debt-collectors/
I feel this needs re-posting here….teachers really need to engage parents and work with them more on this issue. Parents hear “accountability” and think it makes sense. Explain to the parents how it all works. Then ask them if they think it will be good for their child:
*******
Let’s not forget FERPA. This used to protect a child’s educational record. However, recent changes now allow your children’s personally identifiable information (PII) to be shared with third parties for research and “personalized” products (i.e. development)
So now, for the price of a dollar – which the government took from us in the first place – every state will create a database so that they can evaluate the effectiveness of the programs that they are forcing us to put in place. Due to the Herculean effort and diversion of resources that these reform initiatives entail, surely schools will fail, and schools will be taken over. Then they have the the money, the data and our children!
This is fraught with loads of issues, not the least of which is identity fraud. Our own Homeland Security director tells us that cyber attacks are imminent. Do you think State or Federal governments (or the organizations with whom they share the data) can keep our children’s (and possibly teacher’s) PII data safe? I have my doubts.
Ask your district now! Put it in writing! Ask these questions: What data is included in a student record? What teacher data is included? Who does the district share the data with? Who will be accountable if this data is breached? School’s must address this if you ask! Please explain this to parents in your district. Tell your PTA! They will be concerned.
If they can’t answer the questions to your satisfaction, don’t give them the data!
Opt-out of Directory information.
Parents – opt your children out of testing.
Opt-out of any and all electronic data collection – any program where your students enter data electronically or get tested!
They can NOT evaluate or release what they do NOT have!
Without web based education, students in rural areas have no hope of the rich curriculum available to students in densely populated urban areas.
Without the flexibility of web based classes my son would been forced to chose between taking vector calculus and linear algebra or physical chemistry. Which would the reader suggest he should have given up?
Our children should never have to give up their personally identifiable data. FERPA is supposed to protect them, not open up gates of who can access their data. Ethical companies anonymize data before passing on the data.
2009 stimulus money promoted expansion of electronic educational and health records. While increased access to and integration of data is an important goal for delivery and research, the cart has been put before the horse.
As pointed out in this American Medical News article, “mobile devices are like other new information technology in health care: A technology is introduced, and the rate of adoption outpaces efforts to ensure its security.” http://www.ama-assn.org/amednews/2011/12/19/bil21219.htm
Increased use of cloud computing (“horrendous” according to Steve Wozniak) and mobile technologies in both education (touted as “personalized learning”) and health care, linked to data mined from social media, creates virtual identities that are outright wrong. (The FTC settled with Spokeo for violations, including failing to ensure that the information it sold was accurate, when job seekers were negatively impacted by information they sold to employers. http://www.mwe.com/FTC-Collecting-and-Selling-Data-Mined-from-Social-Media-Sites-Covered-by-FCRA-06-25-2012/)
BIG DATA is collected and shared between commercial entities and governmental interests. http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/07/exclusive-google-cia/
Exclusive: Google, CIA Invest in ‘Future’ of Web Monitoring
The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time — and says it uses that information to predict the future. The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents — both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine “goes beyond search” by “looking at the ‘invisible links’ between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events.” The idea is to figure out for each incident who was involved, where it happened and when it might go down. Recorded Future then plots that chatter, showing online “momentum” for any given event.
Oregon was the first state in the nation to adopt, cloud-based Google Apps for Education. As indicated in the signed agreement I got through a public records request, Google “may store and process Customer data in the United States or any other country in which Google or its agents maintain facilities.” “Google has access to ‘Education Records’ and it is deemed a ‘school official’…”
2013 State of the Endpoint Sponsored by Experian® Data Breach Resolution Independently conducted by Ponemon Institute LLC Publication Date: January 2012
Click to access 2013%20State%20of%20Endpoint%20Security%20WP_FINAL4.pdf
*Eighty percent of respondents believe laptops and other mobile data-bearing devices such as smart phones pose a significant security risk to their organization’s networks or enterprise systems because they are not secure.
*Third-party application risk increases. Google Docs and Adobe, including Flash and Adobe Reader are the applications of greatest concern.
*The lack of an enforceable centralized cloud security policy is putting unstructured confidential information at risk. Forty-five percent of respondents say their organization does not enforce employees’ use of private clouds and 14 percent are unsure.
US Department of Education Chief Privacy Officer, Kathleen Styles, recently blogged on fair information practices (FIPs) and referred to Robert Gellman’s history of FIPs. http://bobgellman.com/rg-docs/rg-FIPShistory.pdf
OPB report Rob Manning recently reported on Oregon’s SLDS. http://www.opb.org/news/article/planned-oregon-education-database-raises-thorny-questions/
State longitudinal data systems, like what Oregon is putting in place, do not adhere to a fair information practice, even though in “April 2011, the Obama White House included a version of FIPs in a report by the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC).”