Archives for category: Privacy
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Facebook Lies About Facebook for Kids

By dianeravitch
February 19, 2018 //
28

Wired magazine reports that Facebook funded most of the experts who “vetted” Messenger Kids, an app designed for children as young as 6. It did not consult critics or defenders of children’s privacy and their childhood.

One of the “experts” that consulted with Facebook was the National PTA, which received funding from Facebook.

What is it with the National PTA? They were enthusiastic about charters and garnered big donations from Gates, now Zuckerberg gets them on board to put little kids online.

Categories Privacy, Technology

Prepare Your Child for a Lifetime of Surveillance

By dianeravitch
January 27, 2018 //
2

The surveillance state is a reality. Someone is watching you. They see you on hidden cameras as you move around the city. They see your emails.

When your child goes to school, someone is watching his or her eye movements, measuring their responses.

I have been writing about this for a while (see here and here), prodded on by my friend Leonie Haimson, who was one of the activist parents who brought down inBloom, the data mining business funded by Bill Gates with $100 million.

We must guard our children’s privacy. Someone wants their data. They want it to enable them to design new products to sell to them and their school.

Don’t let them have your child’s data. Resist.

Categories Privacy, Technology

New York City: Parent Leader Seeks to Block Release of Student Info to Charter Schools

By dianeravitch
November 13, 2017 //
20

Johanna Garcia, a New York City public school parent and president of her district’s Community Education Council, has lodged a formal complaint to the U.S. Department of Education about the city Department of Education’s policy of turning over student records to charter schools for their marketing and recruitment campaigns.

Here is the press release.

Question: we have heard for years about charter school waiting lists, about their need for more seats. Why do they need to spend so much effort and money on recruitment and marketing if these wait lists actually exist? Why do they need to extract students names and addresses (and more) from the public schools if they have wait lists?

Leonie Haimson writes about Johanna Garcia’s complaint here:

“In her complaint, Johanna questions whether charter operators are receiving students’ test scores, grades, English learner and/or disability status from DOE in addition to their contact information, based on her personal experience with the selective charter recruitment of her three children. More evidence for this possibility is also implied by an email that I received from the DOE Chief Privacy Officer Joe Baranello, in response to my inquiry about the legal status of these disclosures.

“DOE has voluntarily supplied the contact information for students and families without parental consent to Success Academy and other charter schools since at least 2006 and perhaps before, as revealed in emails FOILed by reporter Juan Gonzalez in 2010 and cited below.

“As Eva Moskowitz wrote Klein in December 2007, she needed this information to “mail 10-12 times to elementary and preK families” so that she could grow her “market share.” Attention has been paid recently to Moskowitz’ current goal of expanding to 100 charter schools, and her aggressive expansion plans will be facilitated by SUNY’s recent agreement to change their regulations, exempting her from teacher certification rules and allowing her to hire teachers with just a few weeks of training to staff her schools.

“Just as critical to her plans for rapid expansion is her ability to send multiple mailings to families for recruiting purposes. In 2010, it was estimated that Success Academy spent $1.6 million in the 2009-2010 school year alone on recruitment and promotion costs, including mailings and ads, amounting to $1300 for each new enrolled student. The need to do a massive amount of outreach to fill seats is intensified by the fact that only half of the students who win Success Academy admissions lotteries actually enroll in her schools, according to a new study.

“In stark contrast to DOE’s voluntary and continuing practice of helping charter schools recruit students by providing them with the personal information of NYC public school students, the Nashville school board has recently refused to provide their students’ contact information to charter schools, prompting a lawsuit filed against them by the State Education Commissioner. The Commissioner cites a Tennessee law passed by the Legislature in August that she claims requires the district to share student contact information with charters.

“In response, Nashville attorneys argue that the release of information to charter operators for the purpose of marketing their schools to families is forbidden by FERPA, as this would be a commercial use of the data. Last spring, a Nashville charter school agreed to pay parents $2.2 million to settle a class action lawsuit against them for spamming them with text messages urging them to enroll their children in the school.”

Open the post to read it in full and to follow the links.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Parents, Privacy, Privatization, Tennessee

Coming Soon to a School Near You: A Biometric Device to Measure Students’ Brainwaves

By dianeravitch
October 28, 2017 //
32

They said it couldn’t or shouldn’t be done, but here it comes: a biometric headset that measures students’ level of “engagement.”

EdSurge reports that a start-up called BrainCo has invented a headset to measure brain activity. This information can be transmitted instantly to the teacher so she knows which students are engaged and which are not. Apparently, just looking at their faces and their expressions is no longer adequate. (Be sure to see the video that is included in the link.)

A few years back, Bill Gates invested in a biometric bracelet. In 2013, I posted several times about the Gates-funded galvanic response monitor. That didn’t seem to go anywhere, to my knowledge.

But the idea didn’t die. Now it appears to be arriving as a headset, not a bracelet.

If Blade Runner had a classroom scene, it might look something like the promotional video by BrainCo, Inc. Students sit at desks wearing electronic headbands that report EEG data back to a teacher’s dashboard, and that information purports to measure students’ attention levels. The video’s narrator explains: “School administrators can use big data analysis to determine when students are better able to concentrate.”

BrainCo just scored $15 million in venture funding from Chinese investors, and has welcomed a prominent Harvard education dean, who will serve as an adviser. The company says it has a working prototype and is in conversations with a Long Island school to pilot the headset.

The headband raises questions from neuroscientists and psychologists, who say little evidence exists to support what device-and-dashboard combination aims to do. It also raises legal questions, like what BrainCo will do with students’ biometric data.

BrainCo has some big ideas. The company’s CEO has said that BrainCo aims to develop a tool that can translate thoughts directly into text, or “brain typing.” To support that work, the company plans to use data collected from students using its headsets to compile “the world’s largest brainwave database.”

Theodore Zanto, a professor of neurology at the University of California at San Francisco, had two words when he first read through the company’s website: “Holy shit.”

The brains behind BrainCo

The founder and CEO of BrainCo is Bicheng Han, a PhD candidate at the Center for Brain Science at Harvard University. In 2015, his Somerville, Mass.-based startup was incubated in the Harvard Innovation Lab, and last year the company received $5.5 million in seed funding in a round led by the Boston Angel Club, with participation from Han Tan Capital and Wandai Capital, to develop BrainCo’s first product: Focus 1.

Teachers have an innate ability to know when their students are engaged, but we want to give them a superpower so they can track and quantify that over time.

Focus 1 is a headband that aims to detect and report brain activity through EEG, or electroencephalography, which measures in the brain. To advertise the device to schools, BrainCo packages the headset as Focus EDU, which essentially is the headset plus a dashboard where teachers can view all of their students’ EEG data. According to the video, a high numerical score for the EEG signal suggests that a student is paying attention; a low score is interpreted as a distracted or unfocused student.

Max Newlon, a research scientist at BrainCo, adds the company is also studying if the headset could help students and families “train their brain” to improve attention skills.

BrainCo is hardly the first company to sell so-called “brain-training”—or even EEG headsets. Similar devices include Muse, a “personal meditation” headband intended to guide relaxation based on real-time EEG readings. There’s also Neurocore Brain Performance Centers, clinics that “empower you to train your brain” also using EEG readings. (Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is among Neurocore’s investors.)

Focus EDU, by contrast, is among the first EEG products that will be marketed directly to teachers and schools.

“We are trying to be the first company to quantify this invisible metric” of student engagement, says Newlon. “Teachers have an innate ability to know when their students are engaged, but we want to give them a superpower so they can track and quantify that over time.”

The idea was enough for BrainCo to win awards including “Most Innovative” at a pitchfest during the 2017 International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) national conference.

But the company has also faced less enthusiastic reviews. At the 2016 CES conference, an electronics and consumer tech tradeshow, BrainCo’s Focus 1 device flopped in a live demo, which attempted to use human brainwaves detected by the headband to control a robotic hand. The Daily Dot called it the most “cringeworthy demonstration” at the event. “That’s a mishap that calls into question the overall function of the device,” the reporter wrote. “Was it ever actually reading the brainwaves at all?”

When BrainCo returned to CES in 2017, the company arrived with an even bigger robot—which the site WearableZone reported was a success—along with a strategic “pivot” towards education.

More recently, BrainCo has chalked up some big wins: It signed education superstar, James Ryan, Harvard’s dean of education, as an adviser. And now it’s closed a $15 million Series A funding round, bringing the the company’s total funding to nearly $20.5 million. The funding was led by Chinese investors Decent Capital and the China Electronics Corporation, which on its website describes itself as “one of the key state-owned conglomerates directly under the administration of central government, and the largest state-owned IT company in China.”

My reaction: The same as Theodore Zanto, quoted above.

Categories Education Reform, Privacy, Technology

How to Protect Your Child’s Privacy

By dianeravitch
May 17, 2017 //
8

Leonie Haimson and Rachael Stickland of the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy created a toolkit for parents to defend against the invasion of children’s privacy by commercial and governmental interests. The toolkit was devised in collaboration with the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood.

Haimson and Stickland explain why they developed the free toolkit and why parents should use it.

They write:

“Despite a clear desire among many parents to protect their children’s sensitive data, few resources exist to help them navigate the confusing patchwork of laws and regulations that govern student privacy. Most guidance is aimed at schools and districts, not parents, and what has been produced is often filled with legal and technical jargon. To compound the problem, most widely available student privacy resources are often written by organizations funded or supported by the growing ed-tech industry and who advocate for increased data sharing rather than reducing it.

“In fact, millions of student data points are currently soaked up every day by schools or their vendors and shared with third parties, including for-profit companies, government agencies, and researchers, without parental knowledge, and with few or uncertain security protections. The personal data collected from children may include students’ names, email addresses, grades, test scores, disability status and health records, suspension and discipline data, country of birth, family background, and more. Other digital data collected may include internet search history, videos watched, survey questions, lunch items purchased, heart rate and other biometric information measured during gym class, and even classroom behavior, such as being off-task or speaking out of turn.

“This information, whether collected by schools directly or by contractors supplying online learning platforms, classroom applications and websites, are often merged together and analyzed via algorithms to profile a student’s skills, strengths, abilities and interests, and to predict future outcomes. How this sensitive data may be used, with whom it can be shared, and how it can be protected are questions on many parents’ minds. Finding answers can be hard; schools often find themselves caught in the middle.”

They developed the parent toolkit to help parents protect their children.

“Our toolkit, available on the PCSP [Parent Coalition for Student Privacy] website, offers clear guidance about what student privacy rights exist under federal laws and what steps parents can take to ensure these laws are enforced, suggests questions they can ask to learn more about their schools’ data policies, and recommends best practices that parents can urge their school and district officials adopt, all with the goal of protecting and securing this data. We also suggest tips that parents can use at home and sample opt out forms to minimize the risk that their children’s privacy will be breached or abused.”

They include a link to the toolkit.

Categories Data and Data Mining, Parents, Privacy, Students

Beware the SAT and ACT: They Sell Confidential Student Data

By dianeravitch
April 3, 2017 //
8

PSAT/SAT day is Wednesday April 5 this week in NY schools and many other public schools in states around the country. These exams are now required in at least 9 states, but are given in many more states and districts, including NYC.

The College Board is unethically if not illegally amassing a huge amount of personal student information through the administration of these exams and selling it for a profit (though they call it “licensing” the names) at 42 cents per student. They are providing the information to a range of undisclosed institutions and companies, including reportedly the Department of Defense to help them recruit for the military.

If your child or your students are taking one of these tests, tell them to enter only the minimal info: name, address, gender and date of birth.

Read this post by privacy advocate Cheri Kiesecker:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2017/03/30/how-the-sat-and-psat-collect-personal-data-on-students-and-what-the-college-board-does-with-it/?utm_term=.22c26edc837c

Leonie Haimson responded to the CB claims in the above:

https://nycpublicschoolparents.blogspot.com/2017/03/more-on-college-boards-evasions-and.html

Categories Privacy, Privacy and Privacy Rights, Testing

Chicago: Parent Discovers Massive Breach of Privacy of Student Records

By dianeravitch
March 11, 2017 //
10

A parent in Chicago discovered a massive breach of private data about students in private schools receiving special education services. The data was controlled by Chicago Public Schools, but obviously with little regard for privacy. The parent was a student Privacy activist, Cassie Creswell.

The following post is by Cassie Creswell, a Chicago parent activist from Raise Your Hand Illinois and a key member of our Parent Coalition for Student Privacy. In January, Cassie also testified on our behalf at the Chicago hearings of the Commission for Evidence-Based Policy against overturning the ban to enable the federal government to create a comprehensive student database of personally identifiable information.

More recently, upon examining expenditure files on the Chicago Public School website, Cassie discovered the names of hundreds of students along with the disability services they received at numerous private and parochial schools. She immediately contacted several reporters, and though an article in the Sun-Times subsequently briefly reported on this breach, the reporter did not mention that it was primarily private and parochial students whose data was exposed. In addition, legal claims for special education services that CPS had originally rejected were included along with student names. Cassie’s fuller explanation of this troubling violation of student privacy is below — as well as the fact that at least some of these schools and families have still not been alerted to the breach by CPS.

Cassie writes:

Once again, Chicago Public Schools has improperly shared sensitive student data, the Chicago Sun-Times reported on February 25th.

Medical data about students used to administer outsourced nursing services was stored on an unsecured Google doc available to anyone with the link. And personally-identifiable information (PII) about students with Individualized Education Programs (IEPs), including their name, student identification numbers and information about services and diagnoses related to their disabilities, were included in files of detailed vendor payments posted on the district’s public website.

I discovered this latter information in the vendor payment data, while in the course of searching for information about standardized testing expenditures. The files covered seven fiscal years, 2011-2016, but were only posted on the CPS website this past summer. Noticing what appeared to be a student name and ID number listed in the file struck me as surprising and likely a privacy violation. All in all, there were more than 4500 instances in the files where students’ names appeared along with the special education services they received.

Upon closer examination, it was clear to me that there was a great deal of highly sensitive student personal information that had been disclosed, with payments made from CPS to educational service providers assigned to hundreds of students with special needs attending private schools as well as public schools. Included were the name of the students, the schools in which they were enrolled, their ID numbers, the vendors who had been hired and the services they provided according to the students’ diagnoses. The funds for the payments came from public funds routed through the students’ home districts, CPS, to fulfill requirements of the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) for spending on special education students enrolled in private schools.

This breach has since been confirmed as violating federal and state privacy laws — at least in the case of the public school students whose personal information was disclosed and likely the private school students as well.

Categories Data, Privacy, Special Education, Students

URGENT MESSAGE TO PARENTS IN CONNECTICUT: Your Child’s Privacy at Risk!

By dianeravitch
March 5, 2017 //
6

Parents in Connecticut, pay attention and take action!

The Parent Coalition for Student Privacy has sent out an urgent message to parents in Connecticut.

The legislature is holding hearings on Monday (tomorrow) on a bill that would strip privacy protections from your children.

In January, a legislator proposed to remove all privacy protections from student data. Because of outrage expressed by parents, he withdrew his bill.

But now another bill has emerged. The hearings were hurriedly scheduled. Are they trying to put something over before parents know about it?

This past week a new bill, 7207 to “revise” the student data privacy law, was introduced, and will be heard by the CT Joint Education Committee this Monday, March 6. This kind of a rush job could imply that they are hoping to pass this bill without giving parents time to react. This new bill, 7207, wants to repeal the data privacy law and delay further implementation until July 1, 2018. This would remove existing protection of school children for over a year. WHY?

The Student Data Privacy Law has been in effect since Oct. 1, 2016; it only applies to NEW contracts, only asks for transparency, the CT Edtech Commission has already done the work to implement it. WHY, would Connecticut want to now repeal protection and transparency?

Please email your comment or testimony in Word or PDF format to EDtestimony@cga.ct.gov . Testimony should clearly state your name and the bill you are commenting on: Bill 7207- AN ACT MAKING REVISIONS TO THE STUDENT DATA PRIVACY ACT OF 2016.

Connecticut citizens please contact your legislators directly. If you are not sure who they are or how to contact them you can look that up here: https://www.cga.ct.gov/asp/menu/cgafindleg.asp

Is it asking too much that when a company contracts with a school and collects and uses and shares children’s data, that the data be kept safe and parents be able to see how that data is used, breached, and not sold?

By repealing or delaying this law, who are they protecting?

Categories Connecticut, Data and Data Mining, Parents, Privacy, Resistance, Students

As Governor of Indiana, Mike Pence Used a Personal Email Account for State Business–and Was Hacked

By dianeravitch
March 2, 2017 //
19

The IndyStar reports that former Governor Mike Pence used a personal AOL account to conduct state business, and that his account included sensitive information about security.

Vice President Mike Pence routinely used a private email account to conduct public business as governor of Indiana, at times discussing sensitive matters and homeland security issues.

Emails released to IndyStar in response to a public records request show Pence communicated via his personal AOL account with top advisers on topics ranging from security gates at the governor’s residence to the state’s response to terror attacks across the globe. In one email, Pence’s top state homeland security adviser relayed an update from the FBI regarding the arrests of several men on federal terror-related charges.

Cyber-security experts say the emails raise concerns about whether such sensitive information was adequately protected from hackers, given that personal accounts like Pence’s are typically less secure than government email accounts. In fact, Pence’s personal account was hacked last summer.

Is it time to start chanting “Lock him up”?

Categories Hypocrisy, Indiana, Pence, Privacy

An Organization Fighting to Protect Student Data Privacy: Please Help!

By dianeravitch
December 21, 2016 //
5

Please consider a gift to Class Size Matters, an organization that fights for smaller classes and for student data privacy. Its leader, Leonie Haimson, is a national leader in the movement against data mining of student i.d. Leonie works full-time for no salary or remuneration. Every dollar you give goes to programs and activities.

 

I belong to only two boards: one is the Network for Public Education; please join us as a member and consider a gift. The other is Class Size Matters. Please consider a year-end gift to both.

 

To My Friends, 

Please consider giving to Class Size Matters; a remarkably streamlined and effective non-profit on whose board I serve, that relies on the contributions of parents, teachers and concerned citizens just like you.

 

Your support will help the organization continue its work to ensure that all public school students in this city, state and nation are provided with small classes in uncrowded buildings, with sufficient individual attention from their teachers, and that parents can protect their children’s education data from breach and misuse.

 

This year the organization accomplished several important goals:

 

First on privacy: In 2014, Class Size Matters spearheaded a successful state and national effort to defeat inBloom, the $100 million Gates-funded corporation designed to collect and share the personal data of students in nine states and districts. inBloom closed its doors in 2014 when NY State passed a law against it – the last state to pull out.

 

The Parent Coalition for Student Privacy, which Class Size Matters helped start after inBloom’s demise, is now leading the national effort to oppose the dangerous, Gates-funded campaign to overturn the federal ban against the US Department of Education collecting the personal data of public school students, from birth to preK through high school and beyond. If this ban were overturned, it could allow the federal government to track and create a dossier of sensitive information on nearly every American family – a dangerous threat to the privacy and civil liberties of us all.

 

As part of the 2014 law that caused inBloom to close, the NY State Education Department was required to appoint a Chief Privacy Officer who would create a comprehensive Parent Bill of Privacy Rights with input from parents and other stakeholders. This fall, Class Size Matters helped convince the NY State Education Department to finally appoint a Chief Privacy Officer as the law requires. The group also persuaded NYSED to rescind their decision to send all the personal data of the state’s public school students into the NY state archives, where it would have remained for up to a hundred years, vulnerable to being publicly released or misused.

 

Class Size Matters is also continuing to advocate for smaller classes and less overcrowding in our public schools. NYC added nearly a billion dollars to the school capital plan last spring to build more schools, in part because of their advocacy. The organization’s analysis revealed that the DOE had hugely underestimated the need for new seats. New reports and strategies to address the class size and overcrowding crisis in our public schools will be released this year.

 

In October, the NY Appellate Court ruled unanimously that the DOE must open School Leadership Team meetings to members of the public in a lawsuit in which Class Size Matters intervened. These teams, composed of half parents, are an essential part of the school governance system and have an important role in decision-making, and thus full transparency must be required. (A fact sheet that you can post in your schools or forward to parents and teachers is here.)

 

In November, the organization held a very successful citywide parent conference, including guest speakers Comptroller Scott Stringer, Council Member Danny Dromm and education advocate Robert Jackson. Workshops were offered on fighting privatization, parent organizing on school overcrowding, perspectives on diversity, and more.

 

At the national level, given the priorities of Donald Trump and his pick of Betsy DeVos as Education Secretary, we must all work together to protect our public schools from privateers and profiteers who want to defund and dismantle our public schools. Supporting Class Size Matters is more critical than ever before, in the fight for adequate, equitable and well-funded public schools.

 

Please contribute to Class Size Matters. Your donation is fully tax-deductible. If you’d like the donation to go to the organization’s efforts to protect student privacy, please note that on the check or in the comment box online.

 

Yours,

 

Diane Ravitch

 

 

Categories Class size, Class Size Matters Org, Education Reform, Privacy
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