Leonie Haimson and Rachel Stickland are warriors for student privacy. Together, they mobilized parents in state after state to oppose inBloom, the massive data-mining project funded by the Gates and Carnegie Corporations for $100 million with software developed by Rupert Murdoch’s education division; thanks to their efforts, inBloom folded.
But the data mining hasn’t stopped. Vendors are eager to get your child’s name, address, grades, records, interests, and hundreds of other personally identifiable bits of data. We thought our children’s data was confidential and protected by federal law, but as Haimson and Stickland explain in this article, this is no longer the case because the U.S. DOE revised regulations in 2008 and 2011 to make data mining possible without parental consent.
Now Congress is revising the privacy law, but it is inadequate to protect children’s privacy. Haimson and Stickland explain what needs to be done to stop the commercial invasion of children’s privacy.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The fear of terrorism is how Congress & the Senate justify more data mining on Americans. The Senate Foreign Relations Chair Bob Corker wants MORE data collected. He’s playing for an internet dragnet and a phone dragnet.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/johnstanton/senate-foreign-relations-chairman-calls-for-expanded-data-su#.scrRGxlVv
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I;m really grateful to the activists for bringing up that fact that this is NOT consensual for children. It’s not the same as social media.
They will be mandated to use these programs as a condition of receiving a public education. That should require an entirely different privacy analysis than something they are CHOOSING to do. When you force someone to do something, you take on a huge responsibility. You had better know they aren’t going to be exploited or it is ON YOU if it happens. They had no choice. This is particularly relevant for children, and particularly relevant here because government actors are behaving more like salespeople than regulators.
If you’re selling skateboards to schools and requiring that activity for gym class, you’d better get the helmets FIRST.
I just get no sense from the ed tech promoters that they see this difference.
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Highly recommentd this publication and prior reports from the School Commericialism Unit at http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/schoolhouse-commercialism-2014
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It is of course bad enough when they do this to adults. [It looks like the “Patriot” act may have some tweaks to it, perhaps more than tweaks.
BUT
when they include children. God help us.
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Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé.
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