Race to the Top provides incentives for unprecedented collection of student data. Bill Gates and Rupert Myrdoch created a new corporation called inBloom to collect and store this data. They say it is good for students and teachers but it is hard to understand why the government and private corporations need so much confidential data about everyone.
Here is one article that creates a context.
It is about the huge new industry called data mining. Every time we open the Internet or swipe a credit card, our data are added to a profile.
“The industry of collecting, aggregating, and brokering personal data is known as “database marketing.” The second-largest company in this field, Acxiom, has 23,000 computer servers that process more than 50 trillion data transactions per year, according to The New York Times.1 It claims to have records on hundreds of millions of Americans, including 1.1 billion browser cookies (small pieces of data sent from a website, used to track the user’s activity), 200 million mobile profiles, and an average of 1,500 pieces of data per consumer. These data include information gleaned from publicly available records like home valuation and vehicle ownership, information about online behavior tracked through cookies, browser advertising, and the like, data from customer surveys, and “offline” buying behavior. The CEO, Scott Howe, says, “Our digital reach will soon approach nearly every Internet user in the US.”
Big data. The answer to everything except our privacy.
An antique concept: privacy.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It is the one thing we have of value that we are simply born with– our data– and it’s being carefully stripped away for free. It is easy to snooker teens and adults into giving it away for access to a website or use of an app, but you can just hear the big data folks drooling– “If we could just get our hands on that data sooner, it would be awesomely profitable…”
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Without the production of data in the public education system, these companies would not have a product. If data is a product of education and data companies are using this product for their own profits, then in effect, aren’t the data mining companies assuming the role as the owners of education? Is it legally possible for anyone to own education?
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This is an enormous industry now. DARPA has been spending a great deal of your money to support research on doing deep mining of data–creating programs that find relationships among data bits that no human would think to look for. and that describe these relationships in tidy tables and graphics. Such tables will be very useful to people in the future who want to know whom to round up and shoot.
Who would have thought that if I know that you a) have recently purchased kitty litter; b) are white; c) have one parent who earned between 70K and 120K a year; d) own a folk instrument such as a didgeridoo or autoharp; and e) went to elementary school in any of 147 U.S. towns or cities, I can predict with 99.997 percent accuracy that you support the actions of Edward Snowden? (this is a purely hypothetical example, but you get the idea)
Orwell’s Thought Police or the East German Stasi would have LOVED to have had the capability that data mining is providing. And they would have loved to have had every citizen carrying a cell phone with a GPS system on it allowing him or her to be precisely located, at any moment. And they would have loved to have had most citizens pouring out every detail of their private lives on social media sites. And they would have loved cookies more than Cookie Monster does.
The following true story from last month’s news should send a chill up your spine:
During the dramatic protests in Kiev, Ukraine, the government sent text messages to everyone in the vicinity of the protests that read as follows:
“Dear Subscriber, you are registered as a participant in a mass disturbance.”
All it took was having those GPS systems on the cell phones for the government to be able to do this.
Companies selling cell phones in the U.S. are required by presidential order, now, to have such capability built into the phones. And there never was any public discussion of that.
He sees you when you’re sleeping;
He knows when you’re awake. . . .
Welcome to the panopticon.
For more on data mining and prediction, see Duncan J. Watts’s superb book Thinking Fast and Slow. He doesn’t get into the frightening power that these capabilities put into the hands of any future government, however dictatorial and ruthless, but he does discuss the massive amount of government funding that is going into datamining research today.
from the Rheformish Lexicon:
inBloom: cradle-to-grave repository of all information about citizens, including disciplinary records, psychological records, cognitive and affective responses; mechanism for inuring the children of proles to total surveillance; see Total Information Awareness
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There does seem to be an awful lot of regulating going on. I’m almost too scared to post why, but why does North Korea keep a clamp on its populous? Anyone care to venture?
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here’s your creep show moment for today:
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“and again, if you think about your power, your force in this world”
–Lord Coleman
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“We’re partnering with Dan Wagner’s Team.”
They’re partnering with Obama’s data team. They think the data team is what pulled the working class out to stand in the rain for hours in Cleveland to raise the banner of democracy and vote for the little putz they had in their pockets.
Coleman says, “Some people call it “low hanging fruit”, which I think is a strange way to describe a low-income person, but I’ll take it.”
He’ll just take it, he thinks. The children of the American dream are his for the easy pickings. Brothers and sisters, they are not. The thing that brought our people to the polls is a truth beyond all their trends and profiles, a wave continuously rising from sources beyond their control. It belongs to all of us.
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Definitely a CREEP Show. Coleman has NO CLUE. He’s just an entitled preppy who is a manipulator using fear and no justifiable theory for his nonsense.
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And with these data brokers and medical information brokers/bureaus there is little to no oversight and/or Federal or state rules and regulations overseeing them. Change is needed. Sooner, rather than later.
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I considering just stopping my use of the internet. This invasion of privacy is uncalled for. And if it is supposed to protect us, it will be thwarted. People wanting to harm us will find another way.
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No, no. Use the internet, Deb. One serious electromotive pulse, and the data vault would be gone, but the power of millions of individual creative minds remains.
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You are right there Chemtchr….
I go to thousands of place that I hate everyday just to throw those you know whats off.
I have ads popping up from tours in the Antarctica to buying goats in a french Village.
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I feel like removing myself from their constantly lurking commercial eyes. Just because I like, say, one political site, or store, or search one time for one item as a gift, it does not follow that I want constant reminders of how to obtain more of the same. I may be curious about a news story or I might accidentally bump an ad for something I don’t want to see, but, never mind, someone is happy for the “hit” and it triggers even more garbage. I feel luke the internet is trying to guide our decisions. And I do not like that.
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It is frightening to answer the question: why do they need all this data. As some of the above have stated, look at the governments which control their populace. We have been taught that government should serve the people. Now money pimps our politicians who prostitute themselves or do not survive in way too many cases. Journalists, supposedly protected by our Constitution cannot now keep their sources of information secret but our politicians can. “When will we ever learn, When will we ever learn?”
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Why?
$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
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The US DOE: NSA for Kids!
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Lots of money to be made in NY thanks to Joel Klein who days after leaving his job as NYC Chancellor took up with Murdoch.
Don’t know how to embed videos but check out this one. At mark 3:36 you’ll see the data in action. Kids will be forever labeled now. “Shows enthusiasm” can be measured! Who knew?
https://www.inbloom.org/our-vision
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the problem is Capitalism!
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Interesting interview this morning (2/21/14 at 9AM, PDT) available on-line or for download at KQED Radio, San Francisco. In a FORUM program titled Protecting the Privacy of Student Data Online, host Dave Iverson discussed the potential for data mining and asked questions of Jim Steyer, Common Sense Media and Mark Schneiderman responsible for Education Policy at the Software Information Industry Association.
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