There is good reason to be worried about the effort by the federal Department of Education to create a massive database. Doing so is part of Race to the Top.
There is reason to be concerned about inBloom, the project funded by Gates and managed by Rupert Murdoch.
In this review of a new book about Google, the writer says:
“The advance of information technology epitomized by Google heralds the death of privacy for most people and shifts the world toward authoritarianism.”
These trends are not inevitable. The time to stop them is now. Join with others and let your elected officials know that you will not abandon your privacy or your children ‘s.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The recent court order requiring Google to comply with an FBI demand to turn over records of several individuals’ Internet activities certainly confirms the level of seriousness that should be given to this article. inBloom will warehouse detailed student data for years to come, and as policies change, that data would very easily be available to be used against the citizens.
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Excellent comment. Even now people need to be educated about the “information footprint” they leave via social networking and how such info can be made public even years later. The data sharing issue puts an entirely new, sinister layer to this “footprint.”
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Notice how many websites have recently changed to requiring that people post comments by signing in with Facebook etc., i.e., no more anonymity allowed? What you end up with is loss of privacy, an ability to track commenters via Google etc., as well as many more conservative responses that support union-bashing and the neo-liberal free-market agenda.
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Just think Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, Mao’s China and Kim Il Jong’s North Korea and that is where we are going. We are creating more terrorists in order to continue the very profitable and people controlling and loss of freedom “War on Terror.” This is just like the “War on Drugs” in which the CIA during Vietnam supplied a lot of the heroin and later under Reagan supplied a lot of the cocaine to have profits to supply their black “Off the Books” projects. We have become the “Destroyer of Worlds” and you are seeing this in the privatization and corporatization of education also. This is all about “Total Domination” not Democracy and benevolence. Historically, this has always blown up in their face.
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I always end up agreeing with George because I believe these times are that extreme. That we are sitting on the precipice of a new day and a new and horrifically different society. We have entered the MIDAS AGE. The quest and obsession for wealth and power is beyond reason or humantarian regard. The course this is on seems too big to fail and so well constructed without regard for laws, either legal or biblical. It is so extreme that even the Liberals and Tea Party folks have come together in some places and are fighting this heinous attack on our systems of all variety and importance.
George speaks of war and war is a business. When there is little to less of business to sustain our populations for supporting themselves and families, war and prisons look like safety nets. Throwing away privacy and attacking basic rules of civilized life sustaining fail safe laws and institutions is terrifying to regard in a real and profound way. The time to speak up and protest is now, not when it is much to late. If nothing else but to live with oneself.
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Please read Howard Blume’s front page ed article today in the LA Times. He writes only about Common Core, not focusing much on the drawbacks, but never mentions the date mining for profit by InBloom and the Gates/Murdoch influence.
I hope teachers and all educators will help to better inform the California public on the real issues.
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Frankly I would certainly prefer if all our comments on this site were not in cyberspace for all to read. I get enough hate mail for progressive activities and refuse to be anonymous here and on other collegial blogs. We have already lost all rights of privacy and there really is no anonymity online even with use of a nom de plume.
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I am anonymous not that I care..but for the teacher friends and parents that I represent.
Believe me, their would be repercussions for these people.
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The vast preponderance of threats to individual freedom in the world today devolve from a single source, to wit (or not) —
>The Rising Tide of Moneytheism that threatens to drown every other value we ever held dear …
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Anyone who uses a free webmail service has probably gone much further down this road than they appreciate. Witnesses have trouble accurately recalling something that happened to them in the past hour. If the event happened a year or two in the past, they’re completely unreliable. Show them documents they received or authored in connection with the event, and they’ll start to remember some things, but they defer to the document at all times, because the document is the most accurate record.
How many of your documents and communications are on servers hosted by Google, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo? Thousands? Tens of thousands? It’s an understatement to say that these companies know more about us than we’d like. They probably know us better than we know ourselves.
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I put my Google account on hold, and try not to do anything associated with it. Then I tried to read an ed article in the NYDaily News, and the article was hidden. For me to read it I had to post an answer to a poll question that was powered by Google. I guess I won’t be reading the Daily News for a long time.
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One could as easily argue that the Internet and social media are shifting the world toward anti-authoritarianism as billions of people acquire the ability to have a voice with a potentially global reach. We are seeing countless examples of people using digital technologies to push against authority and the use of search engines, social media, and other tools to help widen the impact of those pushes. Our ideological lenses frame our understandings. For example, we can issue broad diatribes against the dangers of technology or we can take more nuanced views that also recognize the benefits that accompany digital advances.
Perhaps more importantly, while it’s true that interconnected databases and webs of information create new privacy challenges, it’s often very unclear what should be done about it. What are your suggestions, Diane, regarding Google and privacy? After all, it’s not as if Google and search engines are going away… Similarly, what are your suggestions regarding digital databases? That we don’t connect them? That we don’t have them? Since you have wide-sweeping criticisms, I’m curious as to what solutions you have to offer for us on the digital privacy front?
(plus, I’ll note the irony of you using a commenting engine for your blog that requires people to leave their email addresses or login with a social media ID, thus reducing our privacy as every comment we leave here connects our comments to larger databases)
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One could have argued that 20 years ago, perhaps less easily 10 years ago, but today we have already seen the reactionary counterphase set in, containing and controlling where it cannot exploit the energies of expansion.
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Let’s see now, with this purported shift toward anti-authoritarianism brought about by the Internet, we’ve had the Patriot Act, NDAA, FBI spying on news organizations, the effective repeal of the Posse Comitatus Act, NSA collection of personal emails, and the violent eviction of Occupy Wall Street encampments overseen and coordinated by the Department of Homeland Security. Other readers could easily add more examples.
It’s all too easy when blogging or posting comments to think you’re actually doing something – I’m guilty of it at this very moment – but please don’t confuse an online echo chamber with actual mass education, organization and mobilization. You know, the kind where human beings actually gather, speak and act together.
Having grown up in the pitiful, dark ages of print, I nevertheless recall the primitive people from that time mobilizing by the hundreds of thousands for labor rights, civil rights or to end the war in Vietnam, often shutting cities and industries down. Though elected officials at the time claimed to ignore such protests, it later came to be known that they were wetting their pants.
What is there to replace that now? The Huffington Post? Facebook?
Please…
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I don’t think social media is moving fast enough to stop the spread of anti-public school and public school teacher legislation. But when you have the head of a union not allowing teachers to air their opinions or vote on major issues effecting them, you lost everything. Nor will I attend the next few rallies sponsored by my union. The last rally I really wanted to attend against Bloomberg was abruptly cancelled by Randi and that was over 8 years ago. And after that everything went downhill. Social Media did little to get the word at on Julie. I know, because I and others tried. The only member of the media who interviewed her was John Gambling. And I suspect that was because they didn’t want to upset the reform apple cart. I am also sure my education FB page is being monitored because I can see how many people are on my site at one time. These are either teachers who are afraid to step into the water, my own union, or the press. Either way, the move to stop what’s happening in Chicago and around the nation is happening faster than people realize, and by the time teachers wake up, it will be too late. This is why most of the time I feel I am just spinning my wheels.
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Hmmm… let’s see. Egypt. Tunisia. M15 in Spain. The Occupy Movement. Gezi in Turkey. Greece. And so on.
Citizen bloggers, photographers, videographers, and journalists who are reporting, fact-checking, breaking stories, etc.
Yeah, I think there’s something there. Not replacing actual gatherings of people, but facilitating, fostering, and reinforcing them, as well as spreading their reach and impacts. Is there a pushback from those in control? Are those in power trying to quash these movements? Of course, as they always have. And yet we as individuals and groups have more expressive potential – and greater potential audiences – than ever before in human history. Should we minimize and reject that? Absolutely not.
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Wished it worked for teachers. Imagine if every teacher in the USA had a “Day of Outrage!!” in front of their own city halls.
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Should we minimize and reject these technologies? Of course not: this blog is evidence of their usefulness.
On other hand, it’s human bengs that push back against authoritarianism, not technologies, as you stated.
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Technology in itself is neither good nor bad. The way technology is USED determines whether it benefits or harms us. When technology is used to erode our privacy, snoop into our personal lives without our consent, and use that information to control us, that is very bad indeed.
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Diane, you said:
“Technology in itself is neither good nor bad. The way technology is USED determines whether it benefits or harms us. When technology is used to erode our privacy, snoop into our personal lives without our consent, and use that information to control us, that is very bad indeed.”
I completely agree with those last two sentences, which is why I often push back when I see posts here (or elsewhere) saying that certain technologies are harmful/evil or inevitably cause societal ills. For example, the quote in your original post said:
“The advance of information technology epitomized by Google heralds the death of privacy for most people and shifts the world toward authoritarianism.”
That quote blames the technological advances themselves, not how folks are using these new technological affordances in ill-intentioned ways, which is why I chimed in… Thanks.
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