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$100 Million Student Database Worries Parents
asjk writes "The controversial database includes millions of children and documents their names, addresses, disabilities other statistics and demographics. Federal law allows for the files to be shared with private companies. From the article: 'In operation just three months, the database already holds files on millions of children identified by name, address and sometimes social security number. Learning disabilities are documented, test scores recorded, attendance noted. In some cases, the database tracks student hobbies, career goals, attitudes toward school - even homework completion. Local education officials retain legal control over their students' information. But federal law allows them to share files in their portion of the database with private companies selling educational products and services."
There is no vast government conspiracy to expose how retarded your kid is. Besides, let's face it, everyone who has met him already knows.
Is this just CT babble, or a real thing? Seems a bit far.
permanent record. I thought it was a bluff!
I, for one, will be naming my future son Robert'); DROP TABLE Students;-- .
Local school administrators are worthless pieces of shiat, that are looking to scam as much money as possible for themselves and their cronies.
I expect that nearly EVERY district is already in talks with various marketing firms about how much this data is worth.
Apparently none of these parents have heard of Facebook.
... don't build a database of ruin.
So yes, those parents are right to be worried.
i wonder if they are researching how likely some of these children with low test scores will be to accept a carbon tax for riding bikes when they come of voting age.
what the fuck is up with the news today? faith in humanity lost wtf
This is a fantastic way for the company to make money for the schools... Oh, wait, scratch that. I meant to say for the administrators and the company to make money for them selves at the risk of future generations. We all know how well these benign corporations have done at protecting the private, in this case very private and potentially damaging, information of people. The things these kids are going to have to deal with, identity theft being the prime one, when they grown older is going to be sad to see. The scum bags behind this sort of thing should be strung up for their greed and lack of forethought of the ramifications for their "business model" on this most vulnerable segment of our population.
Tell me again, guys, how your country isn't losing it's mind.
Seems like a win all around, then!
Let me see, shows antisocial tendencies by thinking there is anything wrong with recording every bit of life and using it to judge.
http://www.masonichip.org/
Unless they have an insanely awesome security team and very rigorous employee screening, this will not end well.
The smarter way to handle it would be to replace personal information with UIDs. School districts alone can map UIDs to actual students. It'd be relatively trivial to implement, on either side. Sure, if someone crouched the numbers hard enough, they might be able to use analysis to collate the data to individuals. But that'd be enough to keep random stalkers, pedos, abusive parent with a restraining order against them, etc at bay.
If I was the non-profit running the DB, I'd be strongly pushing for something like that to absolve me of the liability and risk. Less persistent threats if the data is only useful to the student, school and statistics folks. The data, especially anonymized, would be VERY useful for curriculum research and development.
What kind of country allows this kind of information to be tracked "en masse", much less sells it to private companies? It reminds me of the credit-rating agencies:P private companies that somehow are magically authorized to suck up all of your financial information and sell it. At least the US finally added the ability for you to "freeze" your credit data. That's the wrong way around - they ought to have to actively ask for permission, but it's better than nothing.
Now your kids need to be able to "freeze" their school data. Worse, the US is continually trying to force its lack of privacy on the rest of the world, most recently with FATCA.
It's a crying shame that the US Constitution forgot to list privacy as a basic right to be guaranteed by the government, right next to life and liberty. Failing that, you guys really need to get some privacy laws on the books!
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Another win for homeschooling!
I'd suggest we look back on the track record of such databases.
I won't go and track down the links (There's a link somewhere to the famous HBR "Database of Ruin" article, and that has a number of good links).
However, when you have potential for profit and money, you have almost certain abuses.
When you have people (humans), administering these types of databases, you have certain (100%) abuses. There are a number of documented cases of cops abusing DMV and arrest report DBs for purposes of harassment, stalking and revenge.
There are "grey" private detectives that are called "skip tracers." If you want to find out more, check out this book, called "How to Disappear."
This database WILL be misused. It may come back to haunt folks in thirty years.
I was able to rack up a pretty significant juvenile record, way back in the "paper era." I'm real glad that was never tracked, although I'll bet it would bubble to the surface if I ever wanted to work for the NSA.
The database is a joint project of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which provided most of the funding, the Carnegie Corporation of New York and school officials from several states.
All it looks like to me is a $100M SQL Server project for Microsoft, secured by the former CEO for his friends back at the home office.
Acts 17:28, "For in Him we live, and move, and have our being."
Finally, a win for homeschooling!
FTFY.
See that's un-American of you, because by taking away the freedom of corporations to buy and sell private information about you, you are interfering with their precious freedom.
How dare you.
attitudes toward school - even homework completion
I'm confused on what this point has to do with the student. I never liked school growing up, I didn't like my teachers and I didn't like doing homework, yet I just graduated with my SECOND engineering degree. I'm pointing this out because what is going to happen from this database is private company's will see that Billy doesn't like going to school and assume incorrectly that Billy wont be a good employee when he grows up.
This database is effectively a big profiling system that is designed to trap kids who don't feel that achieving is the most important thing in the world. How a kid feels about school really doesn't place any bearing on how they do in life overall, a kid that hates school can become an engineer well kids that love school end up drug addicts ( The "school lovers" I knew ). This database will not help kids in the long run, it will be used as a tool to track, record and hinder kids into adult hood, all because this database will track what Billy thinks of school and his teachers.
This is just a disaster for young people for the rest of their lives! They will be branded, slotted, discriminated against forever just because they are on this list! This MUST be stopped, and IMMEDIATELY! If there was ever a more egregious example of privacy violation, I cannot think of it! These pinheads - what are they THINKING?
There's no longer such a thing as a childhood. Anything you do or say practically from birth will be recorded and used against you. Have a bad year in grade school and some one will bring it up in your thirties when you apply for a job. A childhood prank and suddenly you are seen as a risky hire. It's already happening with social media as others are pointing out but imagine your whole school record available to employers and credit agencies? Even your criminal record is sealed when you turn 18 for a reason. One childhood mistake shouldn't ruin a life but they seem to have found a way. Perfect people will succeed, the rich as well since money can hide many sins, but the rest of us need to start worrying.
This sounds like a card game.
"Money and status trump children's privacy, but Children trump adult privacy in legal filesharing". Or something.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Isn't it neat when other people get to decide if they want to share YOUR personal data?
bickerdyke
{shrug} depends on your definition of "win". For us, rampant drug use, chronic bullying, and overemphasis on sports at the expense of academics were all important reasons to homeschool our hatchlings. So from my point of view, this news is indeed *another* win.
Also that gets into Gattaca grade problems because data "wants to be abused!" (To abuse a phrase!) So what's stopping insurance companies from playing games with it as well as employers?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
There is NO way that this information should be available to private companies. There is no justification. ZERO. This puts school boards and whoever else is collecting and accessing this data into an unacceptable conflict of interest. They're right this data is worth money. But what they should be saying is: "No, you can't have it at ANY price, because we protect the privacy of the students we are entrusted to teach."
The information would be very helpful to evaluate progress of students individually and overall, but tying it to them in easily identifiable ways is foolish. It's a disaster waiting to happen. Access to it should be very limited, and some information shouldn't be generally accessible to anyone. Federal laws should PROHIBIT sharing of this data with anyone but the school authorities.
To demonstrate how bad this is, I have another suggestion. Why don't we build a similar database containing all the same information about educators nationwide (employment details, medical history, what they teach, the whole thing), and then sell it to marketers so we can make more money for the schools to run their operations? What's that? There are issues of privacy? Who'd have thunk?
...should have their school records available to the taxpayers who funded them. If teachers can't judge the progress of a student by their school records, how are taxpayers supposed to judge the efficiency of schools or teachers or students without those records?
As far as I'm concerned, as soon as someone gets on the government dole, either because they're employed by the government, or are being supported by the government using taxpayer money, *every* taxpayer has a right to inspect the data. The person paying the bills has a right to know what they're paying for.
Database will be stolen in 5...4...3...
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
On its face, the proposal to share student data with private companies seems to clearly violate FERPA, the federal law covering privacy of educational data. According to the article linked, the schools are claiming that it's OK, because when FERPA says it's OK for student data to be accessed by "School officials with legitimate educational interest", that really also means third-party contractors working for the schools. Apparently, the Department of Education has signed off on this. WTF? How can this possibly fit the legislative intent? It says "school officials", not "school vendors" or "school contractors". And there's a reason for that: actual school officials are subject to some level of public control and accountability, while private contractors are not.
This plan should be challenged in court as a violation of federal law.
So, apparently you're allowed to collect and share all this information about your children, but God forbid they collect a single detail about your guns! Or maybe you just need a private marketing company to do it since Congress made laws that prevents the government from doing it themselves.
That said, we tried gun registration in Canada and it failed miserably due to the cost.
Do research into gun violence and Doctors can't ask if you own a gun....wow....
"The database is a joint project of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which provided most of the funding"
Leave it to Microsoft. And they gave Google crap about privacy?
It has to be unconditional except being a legal citizen or resident.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_guarantee
New Economic Perspectives
I can see prospective employers faking their way into having access to this database.
For anyone wanting to read it.
https://inbloom.org/sites/default/files/inBloom-and-ferpa.pdf
http://blogs.ajc.com/bob-barr-blog/2010/02/01/americans-say-%E2%80%9Cno%E2%80%9D-to-medical-database/
Obama wants to do the same thing with medical records.
I'm also a bit conflicted on the security aspect of the matter, what would any non-pedo's motive be for stealing / compromising this data? The only thing is it becomes a true permanent record in the sense that it can be easily retrieved 20 years down the line. But, another interesting aspect is, nobody that I know of that employees people actually looks up grades and kinda just take your word for it, could that change?
And yet another interesting aspect is how we separate the privacy of 18. Could this erode that line?
From the linked Reuters article:
> The database is a joint project of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which provided most of the
> funding, the Carnegie Corporation of New York and school officials from several states. Amplify
> Education, a division of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, built the infrastructure over the past 18
> months. When it was ready, the Gates Foundation turned the database over to a newly created
> nonprofit, inBloom Inc, which will run it.
I thought the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was trying to *help* children, not *sell* them.
We can't assume a company will be good just because it's non-profit. If access is "limited", how much will it cost to become unlimited? If it's limited, someone is limiting it, and everyone has a price. Don't kid yourself.
Governments are supposed to be non-profit, and look what has happened throughout world history.
When it comes to governments, or any institution that has unrestricted access to all of the information about a population, no amount of suspicion is too much.
" Perfect people will succeed"
No, the boring one, the one which don't make waves, the unremarkable, the one jsut following the flow will be advantaged in such system. The perfect little robot.
Guess what jobs you kid won't be hired for once they look at his school records.
Sharing this information is going to far, corporations should not know these things.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
HERF gun to the serves
Government dole? Sigh.
How about when you personally are in need of some sort of government assistance? Say psychological or medical because of a long term disability that drained your savings and forced you to apply for government disability or even go on medicaid? And then all of your neighbors and potential employers get to look up that maybe you are impotent or utilize long term counseling because of psychological trama you suffered as a child due to a molestation? Of course that won't prevent you from getting any jobs right? And I'm sure the neighbors will let you keep coaching the local soccer team and having you over for dinner?
In aggregate you have every right to know how much is being spent and specifics on where. But you have no right to inspect someone's detailed private data just because government taxes paid for it.
Sorry, SERVERS. (Got to start spellchecking)
FTFA: The database is a joint project of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation,
They label it as "personalized learning" but it could just as easily be used for "personalized hiring". Typical M$ spin applies easily here.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
How can this be legal? The schools are sharing student records with an outside organization. It's also not supposed to be legal to share SSNs in this way. WTF is wrong with people, they think they can just do whatever they feel like.
I'm so glad my Permanent Record, a bundle of IBM cards and a rotting rubber-band, is packed away in a box somewhere, gathering dust. These kids nowadays, they'll never escape theirs.
-- sudon't
Air-ride Equipped
Subject says it all, this would be a clear violation of HIPPA, assuming the school nurse, shrink, guidence counsellor or other specialist is held to that standard as they should be in referance to medical issues of students...
Wait until potential employers start checking your 4th grade transcript...
I cannot believe how cavalier their attitude is towards the possible release of data of millions of children. Where will those attidudes be when a person turns 18 and has to pay thousands of dollars to have their credit score cleaned up because their SSN was hacked?
There's a tedious word, for ever used by British journalists in the ultimate '1984' newspeak fashion- "grooming". However, turning the word against its masters, these giant privacy invading databases that record everything the State can find out about our children are a clear act of 'grooming'. They prepare the coming generation to live in a "no place to hide" society that was commonly discussed as inevitable in the 1950s (although back then it was assumed that we would all end up effective 'slaves' of giant multi-national corporations).
Sometimes 'grooming' of kids is 'good'. When I was at school, we were 'groomed' to accept decimal currency and the SI system of 'weights and measures' at a time when the adults of the nation loved their 'stones', 'ounces', 'inches' and 'shillings'. However, even this 'grooming' had a darker side, for it prepared the nation for entry into the EU (whether the citizens of Britain really wanted this or not).
These child databases are being rolled out in every nation of the West. Of course, the sheeple are told that this is just a giant co-incidence, with each nation spontaneously thinking that this is a good thing to do, regardless of public opinion or concern.
Teachers are being paid to act as spies, and not just in the classroom. Some teachers spend hours a day entering extra details about pupils and their families- actions protected by blanket immunity. You should recall that when the Soviet Union broke up, citizens in nations like Poland and East Germany were shocked to discover just how widespread spying had been by employees of the government, including teachers and doctors. Today, the UK and USA proudly boast how they encourage state employees to spy on us.
The whole program is sold to the sheeple (Rupert Murdoch depicts the users of his world wide news agencies as 'sheep' in the official Fox/News International corporate Xmas cards each year- Google if you don't believe me) on the back of "if you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide". In UK Academy Schools, this 'philosophy' is backed up by hundreds of cameras that track each pupil, even in the toilets and changing rooms.
There is no room for privacy in the world of '1984'. How does an army prepare to brutalise new recruits so they will murder on command? Simple- it strips them of all privacy.
When modern policing was first introduced, the no.1 concern of all politicians was that the new police powers must NOT allow the privacy of ordinary citizens to be destroyed by the State. The police had to have damned good reason to exercise their powers, and then only with a continuous understanding of the rights of law-abiding citizens. Today, this policy has been turned on its head.
Kids are 'groomed' into thinking "only deviants seek privacy- where they clearly intend to hide their undesirable behaviour". For many years now, children of a vulnerable age have been forced to participate in "CIRCLE TIME", where they are instructed to reveal their deepest secrets to fellow classmates and the teacher. I am old enough to recall when such behaviour was said to indicate the brainwashing techniques used by cults- a staple of TV movies from the 1970s.
Society splits naturally into sections.
-the psychopaths who rise to the supreme positions of power, and only pretend to hold religious or dogmatic beliefs.
-the army of evil who willingly serve strong psychopathic leaders. These people do hold religious or dogmatic beliefs, and are stupid enough to think their leaders do to.
-the army of useful idiots who believe that things are the way they are for a good reason, and must be put up with, no matter how much pain they feel
-the collection of decent, moral, good people who despise armies and wars (especially those waged by their 'own' people), and love freedom, individuality and privacy. This group is often cowed by the violence and evil of the other two main groups, which means it frequently mistakes members of its own group for 'useful idiots', and this leads to underestimating th
Exploits of a Mom:
http://xkcd.com/327/
Sheila Kaplan has been on this since federal child provacy laws were relaxed to permit it in 2011. She launched Education New York's National Opt-out Campaign to alert parents to their rights under FERPA to restrict third-party access to their children's information and encourage them to review their school's annual FERPA notification at the beginning of the
school year. Here's her website:
http://www.educationnewyork.com/about.html
and a parent information page
http://educationnewyork.com/optoutnow
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
The initial idea of recording more real data about each student could improve each kid's education, as well as improving the technology of teaching in general. We all know that the coming century demands updated educational thinking. But the private investment wouldn't be there unless the plan from the beginning was to profit from it.
I wish the Dept of Ed had done this on it's own with some basic protections like requiring by law that:
UID information be used only for that person's education
Data being used to track broad, nationwide statistics be stripped of UID
Each person's whole record should be deleted upon graduation, apart from grade transcripts.