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Ask Slashdot: Explaining Cloud Privacy Risks To K-12 Teachers?
hyperorbiter writes "With the advent of Google Apps for Education, there has been a massive uptake by the K12 schools I deal with on signing students up with their own Google powered email address under the school domain. In addition, the students' work when using Google Apps is stored offshore and out of our control — with no explicit comeback if TOS are breached by Google. It seems to me that the school cannot with integrity maintain it has control over the data and its use. I have expressed a concern that it is unethical to use these services without informing the students' parents of what is at stake e.g. the students are getting a digital footprint from the age of seven and are unaware of the implications this may have later in life. The response has often been that I'm over-reacting and that the benefits of the services far outweigh the concerns, so rather than risk knee jerk reactions by parents (a valid concern) and thereby hampering 'education', it's better to not bring this stuff up. My immediate issue isn't so much about the use of the cloud services now, but the ethics over lack of disclosure in the parental consent process. Does anyone have ideas about defining the parameters of 'informed consent' where we inform of risks without bringing about paranoia? (Google Apps is just an example here, I think it applies to many cloud services.)"
This question needs a bit more detail. What *are* the implications of using these Google services? Is Google using the same boilerplate contract? Does it sweep emails for words and phrases to show advertising? Is it collecting anonymous data?
I think you probably need some school-specific clauses to address the particular privacy and safeguards but you haven't articulated any specific examples of areas where you think Google is falling short or why this might become a problem. Kids are going to have digital footprints as children. I might not like that very much, and as a parent I may try to limit it, but you can't stop it.
What gives you the idea that data is safer stored within the US? In reality, I think it is less likely to fall into the 'wrong hands' (someone who wants to embarrass or blackmail your child later in life) stored overseas.
>The response has often been that I'm over-reacting
Because you are.
If you can't articulate what the implications are of using Google Apps for Education, then at least one of the following is true.
1) You don't actually have sufficient understanding of the situation
2) You're the wrong person to attempt being the spokesperson for the "opposition"
You need to be able to articulate your specific concerns regarding use of the service - not just make hand waving statements. If its bad that students have a "digital footprint" from age seven, explain *why*. And, even then, be aware that others may not share your concern (or may have adopted a fatalistic attitude about the situation).
#DeleteChrome
We already have groups of people afraid of wifi, vaccines, and a host of other things that are non-issues. They are also disproportionately afraid that their child will be abducted (by strangers, or even by aliens).
Pretty much whatever you say will either be misunderstood by some subgroup, or deliberately misconstrued by another - and then a school faces the problem of providing a special exception* for some group of students that have been opted out.
* Note that I'm generally in favour of special exceptions in schools because children do have different learning styles and paces - but this would be a crazy addition
Obviously there are valid issues. The question is not IF we should teach them, but HOW.
Right now there are few ways to articulate the risk. There is the vague handwaving education of "bad guys will steal it".
Even when doing this professionally it is difficult to fully understand what the risks are, who exactly the "bad guys" includes, the kind of stuff they want to take, and the reasons they want it. The bad guys may include governments, vandals, corporate espionage, advertisers, news agencies, and more. The stuff they want may include not just credit card numbers, but also patterns of what you like, where you go, and who you are with. That stupid-looking photo may be cute today, but it may destroy your bid for public office two decades later. The fact that your facebook friends have some overlap with a suspected terrorist may put you on a watch list. Knowing the bad guys, and knowing the data they are looking for, is hard.
Then you have the difficulty of explaining it clearly. It is hard enough to explain to a teenager that their quick goofy photos (or much worse, sexting) might, twenty years from now, prevent them from getting their dreams fulfilled. Sometimes it is easier to point out that public stupidity can prevent them from getting a job in three years, but even that seems difficult to teach.
Since that wasn't quite asked, here's the evolved question:
HOW do you teach K12 students about the risks in the digital world?
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
You have this belief of a boogieman in the closet, but have nothing that actually backs it up. But because you think you are so smart you can't possibly imagine that your beliefs aren't true and you are over reacting you expect us to back you up as surely everyone with half a brain must believe what you do.
In the cloud, or any other computer network, you have no privacy. What is there to explain, other than you voted for this?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
And what precisely are the implications and risks according to you?
What precisely do you think isn't being disclosed?
It is an interesting point...
Sugget you do some research, (look into the big G's T&Cs), and write down exactly what you think the issue may be.
Try and be balanced, then fire it off to yor boss.
Your duty is then done, and your ass covered.
Why the quick assumption that students' data is stored overseas? Six of Google's data centers are in the USA, one is in South America (not exactly "overseas", but still out of the country), three are in Europe and three are in Asia. I would think that most data in North America is stored on North American servers, which is probably best for speed and access.
Why is "bringing about paranoia" a problem? Where security is concerned, I generally consider paranoia to be a good default reaction to any situation until I understand it well enough to relax.
Explain the situation well and allow the parents and others to be as paranoid as they consider prudent. Don't try to manipulate them into being more or less paranoid just because you or the system think they should adopt a different mindset. You provide facts then it's their choice to make.
If, OTOH, you're excessively concerned about and wish to avoid creating paranoia you'll hamstring your efforts to be intellectually honest and technically accurate when you "define the parameters of informed consent."
It's easy to explain cloud privacy issues. We'll do it in terms of purses and wallets as those are common items of value that people understand can contain very private information:
Someone is doing the digital equivalent of asking you to keep your purse (or wallet) securely and have it available at all times for you. They won't try to steal the money or credit cards, etc in it (or whatever else of value if you choose to store it). Yes, there may be a security breach, but it's less likely than you dropping or forgetting your purse or wallet.
On the other hand, it means that if you put them in your purse (or wallet) they know how many birth control pills or condoms you kept in it and by when you used them what part of your menstrual cycle you're on or when you had a hot date that turned into an all night.
Now, extend that to your son or daughter that will have records on them from the time they enter grade school until, well... forever.
(In some ways it's not a big deal, but in some ways it is, and that rather graphic example gets across the level of info that can be mined from long term records.)
Like on many occasion, the word cloud is missuses here. It really is software as a service (or SaaS) that we are talking about.
Can I mod the article as a troll ?
The poster is not in the US. ... He didn't say which non-US location he was in
Wild ass guess: New Zealand
It's pretty common in education to put your name on your homework.
It would be trivial for a big data analyst to figure out which alias is which student.
If you can't articulate what the implications are then at least one of the following is true.
1) You don't actually have sufficient understanding of the situation 2) You're the wrong person to attempt being the spokesperson for the "opposition"
I very much agree with this. Unlike the IT worker in the headline I can articulate many of those implications. Unfortunately getting it through a child's view is difficult. Even communicating it to an ADULT is difficult.
We see these things on /. all the time:
* Goofy pictures as a teen, but as 47 year old fired from executive job due to bad public response.
* Seemingly innocent banter about being insane, Texas teenager in jail.
* Picture of children in a bathtub, ten years in prison for child porn.
* "Why would I want to live there?" to your friends, fired from Microsoft.
* Sexting images go public, lives ruined.
And those are the EASY cases.
On their surface none of them seem like threatening issues. I post pictures of myself, friends and, family. I publicly chat with friends. I hope that they never come back and bite me, but in this world even the smallest innocent thing can be taken out of context and destroy lives.
How exactly do you communicate rational responses (not just fear) for these actual risks that we read about daily without sounding crazy?
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
You also need to be able to explain why "their cloud" is less secure than "your cloud". The data / work is being stored on servers somewhere, and if students can access it there is ALWAYS the chance for some misconfiguration or breach that exposes their information. So with that understanding, you need to justify why storing stuff in house would be more secure than with google-- and the truth is, a lot of the time, its not.
Every group of common people (in this case, teachers and/or school administrators in your particular area) tends to have one or two "hot button" issues; things that, when they hear, alarm bells go off in their head and they cannot be swayed otherwise due to past experience or ingrained culture.
Home in on whatever that hot-button is for these particular teachers and find a way to press it hard. Figure out how gmail and cloud services could be exploited against them in that context.
I know it's kind of a dirty political tactic -- and we Slashdorks believe ourselves above such means, preferring to generalize, establishing rationality and understanding -- but sometimes people incapable of unwilling to consider such foresight need to be jerked around for their own good. Otherwise, you'll just come off sounding paranoid and delusional, which is amazing considering recent revelations.
In other words, find out how to be on their side; to align this issue align with the issues in which they already collectively believe.
Don't forget the bit about posting comments insulting religious or political views, and then potential employers not hireing you over it. The annoying thing is it can't be proven: If an employer looks you up and finds you've been insulting his religion, he isn't going to give that as the reason in your rejection letter - you'll just get a generic form rejection saying 'your application has not been successful on this occasion.' It probably happens all the time.
We do that quite often at the school I work at to identify the owner of lost USB sticks handed in to lost property. They sit in a box for a few days, and if no-one claims them then IT is asked to have a quick glance at the contents to identify the owner so they can be returned.
Should we get rid of blackboards, too, because anyone can read what a student writes on it? This is the current reality. You cannot protect students from this type of technology. However, you can prepare them for it.
Create a policy to let students know that everything they do on their account should be assumed to be readable by anyone, so treat it as if you are writing on the classroom blackboard.
In that proper context, it is still a wonderful tool, if used properly. I am sure any school would also support such a policy to avoid unwanted incidents.
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
...except you, me, some other people that realise the full implications and the paranoid.
I work at a Further Education College (14 years upwards) with some Higher ed students (mature) and everyone's all very interested in my opinions about privacy and footprints in exactly the way any educated, engaged person might be about any interesting and important topic but they don't think it applies in their case.
I also stand up at my desk to work. If anyone asks, I'll tell them why. Everyone is interested and thinks it's a good idea but I'm still the only person in the whole college that stands up at my desk.
Read the TOS...filter out the specifics that people need to be aware of...write a report...move on.
My university (U of Hawaii) uses Google's email, but I prefer it to using HotMail, Yahoo Mail, Facebook, or my ISP's email! I never use my hawaii.edu email account, but instead set it to forward everything to my personal email account.
If you're thinking that the schools could just offer their own email systems, have you figured out how much that will cost?
It sounds like you work as the school's email administrator. Since it sounds like you have a financial interest in the outcome of this, you should just be honest and up front about that.
Google has a remarkably good track record regarding security. They may be the best company (of Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and Yahoo) in their industry, and if they aren't #1, then they aren't far behind.
One of the issues you raise is that you are assuming that students will use Gmail for their personal and private use.
In fact, they are free to use whatever they want for their personal email, and simply configure their Gmail account to forward and delete after forwarding. I've investigated quite a few other email providers, and this is rarely a feature they're willing to offer, so in this respect Gmail is way ahead of the competition.
BTW, do you think the schools should also have to disclose that they're using Microsoft software, that it has a such a long and poor security history?
Maybe you could ask one of them to teach you how to write. Combined by" my arse.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
People change their appearances a lot as they grow up. Teenagers, especially girls, look so much alike that 10 years later it's virtually impossible to say "here, it's Jody Smith my coworker, taken 10 years ago when she was 16".
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Don't forget the bit about posting comments insulting religious or political views, and then potential employers not hireing you over it. The annoying thing is it can't be proven: If an employer looks you up and finds you've been insulting his religion, he isn't going to give that as the reason in your rejection letter
He doesn't have to, because that's not the only reason a rational adult wouldn't hire an internet warrior. He might choose not to hire you because you've made it clear that the majority of the people in your own culture are beneath contempt in your mind. That may not be a desirable quality in an employee, even if the potential employer doesn't disagree with your anti-religious views.
'Why is "bringing about paranoia" a problem?'
Seriously. I do research with human subjects. If I don't have at least some people choose to decline participation at the point of informed consent, then I assume my consent isn't good enough - participating in any given research project is *always* not a good choice for at least one person.
Then again, you have the interesting situation that formal school-based education is not the correct solution for every single human; using google apps (or whatever cloud-based system a school is considering) is not the correct situation for every child, yet in both cases the benefits to society (shared childhood experience, guaranteed minimum education level; cheaper infrastructure) may wildly outweigh the relatively minor risks for the individuals.
I think the OP would like some help articulating the problem and that's why he posted here. Beating him to death asking him to articulate is a waste of time. If he could articulate it reasonably at all he wouldn't be HERE!
My $0.02 on the cloud and the reason why I will never store information there, encrypted, overseas, or not. However, I do see things like SaaS via the cloud as a boon. Allow me to explain with the comparison of using the cloud for services and storing information in the cloud.
I have a fundamental belief that our individual intellectual property should be protected as much as our freedom. I believe that our individual digital data should reside with us, be our individual responsibility to safeguard, and be ours to share with whomever we wish, whenever we wish.
I do not believe that your data is ever safe in the hands of someone else, especially, if that someone else is a for-profit business. I do not see encryption being a viable option for data that is stored for long periods of time. Why? Well the people storing your data and that of thousands if not millions of others will most likely have the compute ability to break that encryption. Plus, all encryption does is draw more attention to your data in a for-profit environment. "What are they hiding?"
I do believe that software as a services, e.g., Office365, Google Apps, et al, are a good thing if implemented well. Tools to use in the cloud are good because data is not stored for long periods of time, and if the terms of service are good your data remains private while it is being manipulated in the cloud.
I do believe that storing items in the cloud temporarily because you are sharing them with someone is ok, again, terms of service become the deciding factor. If the data is with you and you have a machine attached to the Internet it's really silly to use an external service to share things, but it may be more secure as you are not compelled to run a service on your home machine where the whole of your data resides. That all depends on your level of server admin competency. Regular home users should probably use a service.
It is difficult to ride the line between privacy and having a life in the modern digital society. If you choose the way of privacy in today's world you will most likely alienate a major group of friends. The drive for young adults to belong and form peer groups is not easily bounded. I think the best the OP could hope to do is to try to educate the parents of the privacy and future implications and hope that gets passed onto their children at home. The teachers and administration will also need to be educated about the possible issues. The bottom line here is educate people so they can make an informed decision on their own. I did say that freedom was also equally important to protect. If people still choose to be reckless after knowing the dangers then they will have to live with the consequences of that choice. I do believe there will be a large segment of our population that will deeply regret how reckless they have been with their privacy.
No. In the summary, OP said that this was being done 'without informing the students' parents of what is at stake'.
The summary also says there is a "lack of disclosure in the parental consent process." Just getting parental consent to "use the internet" or "use Google Apps" is not enough. Unless the parents are explicitly giving their consent to the disclosure of identifying information, then this school is breaking the law.
Maybe the OP is being alarmist, and he certainly doesn't appear to be very competent, but the obvious solution is to read the applicable law (which is COPPA), go down the legal checklist, and make sure his school complies.
Just because a child is enrolled in Google's "Apps for Education" as a matter of allowing their coursework to be monitored, have analytics applied to it by a teacher or their parents, and have the progress tracked by a teacher or parent in a uniform and API transparent way, doesn't meant that their schoolwork is being posted to reddit. You can search your ass off, and you will not find the kids work online, or even their name, unless they put it some place else, like Facebook or Slashdot, where the information *is* public.
The OP is being asinine and alarmist in the extreme: "Oh noes! The clouds, the clouds are going to eat you! All parents should be informed that the clouds are about to eat their children so that we can get a reasonable backlash going, and continue to sell copies of Office on heavyweight, brandy-new Windows 8.1 PCs! 'Case a bad guy has never yet compromised a Windows PC!".
And yeah, maybe an external audit by a competent domain expert might be a good idea, but as long as we are auditing, I;d like to know why we can afford to house the school administration in a new building in the expensive real estate part of tow, but supposedly can't afford to fix the roof in the place where tyhe students are actually being educated. That's an audit I could get behind.
Typically, outsourcing saves money, whether that's sending IT jobs to places where the workers are willing to take less money, or building PCs in places where the labor costs are relatively low and the environmental laws effectively non-existant - or not buying a metric buttload of Microsoft software because it happens to be tied to a particular machine, rather than a person who has to access their data in multiple locations from multiple machines (home, library, multiple classrooms).
Re-buying software to be able to access it on another device makes about as much sense as rebying an eBook to access it from another device, or rebuying an mp3 because you want to listen to it on the home stero, when you're out jogging, and in your car.
Put another way: licensing software to a machine instead of a person is another form of DRM.
About all you can do if you can't get someone to listen (and I'll bet you can't, and I'll tell you why) is to refuse to give your permission for your child to use the Internet as school. So why won't they listen?
Money.
When I left, there was a ~4 million dollar budget to renew and expand the email system (All teachers and staff, all kids, plus all parents, maybe e-mail for life like some colleges do, mail boxes that hold more than 512 megabytes and anti-virus). Google came in and moved everything to Google for under $200,000, expanded coverage of users as we'd wanted, and freed up 3 staff members that were doing nothing but email for other tasks. Hard to argue that $3.8 million bucks that suddenly pops up for other uses isn't a good thing, especially when a lot of other money was cut off. What's going through the superintendents head goes something like this: "Someone worried about privacy -something I don't understand but sound like it's not that important- for kids versus like, 3.8 million I can put toward fixing X, or maybe keeping those 1,000 classroom teachers I was going to have to lay off..."
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
You've brought the issue to light, and then documented publicly that it was aired.
My 1st concern, who agreed to the TOS for the wee ones, and were the parents aware that such a contract was being entered into ? Not sure what state or what In loco parentis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_loco_parentis
status is in that particular area.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
The concern is "My immediate issue isn't so much about the use of the cloud services now, but the ethics over lack of disclosure in the parental consent process. Does anyone have ideas about defining the parameters of 'informed consent' where we inform of risks without bringing about paranoia? (Google Apps is just an example here, I think it applies to many cloud services.)"
I think transparency is a good thing. If the school system provides information to the parents about what kind of information will and may be stored "in the cloud," along with a summary of whatever legal obligations the school system has placed upon the provider with whom they are contracting (or whatever legal promises the provider is making if not under contract), then the goal of transparency will be met. If the school system balks at providing that kind of information, then I would question the appropriateness of the school system's action. The school system's fear of what parents might think if they knew what was being stored in the cloud is not a good reason for the school system to avoid this disclosure. My $0.02.
If the school has based part or all of their educational approach on the use of a particular cloud service for which parental consent is required but for which parental consent might be withheld, then the school system has a lot at stake in getting consent. That might be clouding their judgement. If so, there are deeper problems here than just the need for full disclosure. If the law requires parental consent, it is probably for a good reason. The school system shouldn't be allowed to subvert the requirement for parental consent by creating a situation in which a lack of consent results in a major problem for the educational approach. If the school system doesn't like that, the school system should get the parental consent law changed first. One of the aspects of the USA constitutional system is preventing the tyranny of the masses (in this case the possibility that a parent who objects to a school system practice which they disagree being made to give their consent to it by limiting disclosure because the school assumed in its plans that everyone would go along) and even if the OP is not in the US, the principle is still valid (IMO).
The whole idea of a "digital footprint," corporate data mining, etc. is (I believe) a very valid concern and one that the parents should be allowed to control on behalf of their kids until such point as their kids are on their own. Personally, I think that at a minimum the same kinds of protections that HIPPA requires for health information should apply to information stored about minors. If data mining is going to happen, it should be done in a fashion that eliminate the possibility that specific information will be tied to specific individuals.
So, questions like this are interesting, but what I feel is more important is how effective is it going to be in the classroom? What most teachers and students are really concerned about is how can this better the student's learning and save the teacher time. Administrators care about the bottom line- the budget. If this, or any, technology meets those needs, questions about cloud privacy, and a lot of other things, go out the door.
But a very big thing to focus on is making sure the teachers know how to use the technology. That's true of any elearning solution. I've seen cases where a really robust technology was given to a school, but without sufficient professional development, it fell flat. But as more and more teachers retire, and a new generation of teachers in their 20s replaces them, technologies like these will become ubiquitous, and while questions about privacy are scary, I feel that the ability for teachers to connect with students on multiple channels is overall a positive thing.
Call them ignorant in return. Teachers respond well to challenges that they need to learn something. Bonus points if they think you're calling them stupid instead of non-knowledgable.
There is a real issue here. Minors cannot enter into contracts in most states, so they cannot technically agree to the TOS for Google. The school is requiring the minors to use the accounts as part of the enrollment. That in and of itself is not a problem, but in most states, school records are confidential and these accounts are a type of school record. Therefore, if Google or anyone else does mine the data, then the school is in violation of state statutes and could be held liable. Now, it is quite possible that the agreement entered into between Google and the school has safeguards to protect against this, after all, their for pay business accounts have those protections.
For the record, many colleges and universities also use these accounts for their student mail, but there the students are not minors and can enter into the agreement. But grade school kids, cannot.
There are already laws and regulations in many states about what data can be stored where. Bringing up those rules, and pointing out how the work can be done more safely and follow those rules, can be far more useful than merely saying "we're at risk". The risks are very real, and your concerns well founded.
However, compare it to the security of most academic environments. The passwords are too often kept in the front office desks for easy access. The backup and recovery systems are often a sad joke, and the person responsible for the emaill is far too often someone who says "we trust the people we work with" and the dedicated bad people can't be stopped" and goes on to send passwords in plain text over email, in direct violation of the very policy they signed and published for the school. I've seen all of that happen, personally, at 3 different academic environments in the last decade.
For those people, getting their data into the Google based could is an enormous step _up_ in reliability and security.
That's odd. K12 isn't a term that's really used in either Australia or New Zealand, as far as I'm aware. (Born and grew up in NZ, have now lived in Australia for 20 years).
But then again, my involvement in the school system has only ever been as a student and a parent. Maybe it's a common term internally.
Advanced users are users too!
Each student should have a pseudonym eg myelemschool_grade2_31415@gmail.com which should be burned after use. Simple.
I gather from your use of the "K-12" term that you're in the US (keep that in mind when you ask such questions).
Your challenge is that you're up against several decades of brainwashing to make you (and parents) believe that your privacy isn't worth anything that that it's somehow bad to insist that the state and companies respect the rights they signed up to when they accepted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 (actually there's also such a thing as the right of the child, but both Somalia and the US declined to underwrite that - don't know enough about that to draw a conclusion).
You see, this is the origin of the term "free" in "free" services - all you need to give up is some privacy. So it's not free, you pay with your privacy. What is interesting is that the worst offenders have managed to turn the debate on its head.
You don't have to defend your right to privacy. It's yours, and it's supposedly inalienable. Those who want to invade your privacy have to explain themselves.
Bonus argument for parents: personal details on sites tend to be one programming mistake away from disclosure. Your guiding principle for providing anything to a 3rd party on the Internet is that it is equivalent to giving it to your worst enemy. What's worse, the Internet doesn't forget - this means you're giving information to enemies you haven't even made yet..
Insert
I don't usually mod up ACs, but this is informative and well presented.
We've wrestled with this Google Apps for Education issue as well for a small non-profit I am a trustee of. Is it worth it for the privacy issues? Of course, if the NSA spies on everyone, maybe that is a moot point?
See also John Taylor Gatto on why the system is so hard to change. From:
https://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/17b.htm
------
Power à 22
PLAYERS IN THE SCHOOL GAME
FIRST CATEGORY: Government Agencies
1) State legislatures, particularly those politicians known in-house to specialize in educational matters
2) Ambitious politicians with high public visibility
3) Big-city school boards controlling lucrative contracts
4) The courts
5) Big-city departments of education
6) State departments of education
7) Federal Department of Education
8) Other government agencies (National Science Foundation, National Training Laboratories, Defense Department, HUD, Labor Department, Health and Human Services, and many more)
SECOND CATEGORY: Active Special Interests
1) Key private foundations.2 About a dozen of these curious entities have been the most important shapers of national education policy in this century, particularly those of Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller.
2) Giant corporations, acting through a private association called the Business Roundtable (BR), latest manifestation of a series of such associations dating back to the turn of the century. Some evidence of the centrality of business in the school mix was the composition of the New American Schools Development Corporation. Its makeup of eighteen members (which the uninitiated might assume would be drawn from a representative cross-section of parties interested in the shape of American schooling) was heavily weighted as follows: CEO, RJR Nabisco; CEO, Boeing; President, Exxon; CEO, AT CEO, Ashland Oil; CEO, Martin Marietta; CEO, AMEX; CEO, Eastman Kodak; CEO, WARNACO; CEO, Honeywell; CEO, Ralston; CEO, Arvin; Chairman, BF Goodrich; two ex-governors, two publishers, a TV producer.
3) The United Nations through UNESCO, the World Health Organization, UNICEF, etc.
4) Other private associations, National Association of Manufacturers, Council on Economic Development, the Advertising Council, Council on Foreign Relations, Foreign Policy Association, etc.
5) Professional unions, National Education Association, American Federation of Teachers, Council of Supervisory Associations, etc.
6) Private educational interest groups, Council on Basic Education, Progressive Education Association, etc.
7) Single-interest groups: abortion activists, pro and con; other advocates for
specific interests.
THIRD CATEGORY: The "Knowledge" Industry
1) Colleges and universities
2) Teacher training colleges
3) Researchers
4) Testing organizations
5) Materials producers (other than print)
6) Text publishers
7) "Knowledge" brokers, subsystem designers
Control of the educational enterprise is distributed among at least these twenty-two players, each of which can be subdivided into in-house warring factions which further remove the decision-making process from simple accessibility. The financial interests of these associational voices are served whether children learn to read or not.
There is little accountability. No matter how many assertions are made to the contrary, few penalties exist past a certain level on the organizational chartâ"unless a culprit runs afoul of the mediaâ"an explanation for the bitter truth whistle-blowers regularly discover when they tell all. Which explains why precious few experienced hands care to ruin themselves to act the hero. This is not to say sensitive, intelligent, moral, and concerned individuals arenâ(TM)t distributed through each of the twenty-two categories, but the conflict of interest is so glaring between serving
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I agree with our points as far as they go, and your effort is something to be proud of, but here are some other things to consider which others have raised, plus my own spin.
Most schools do not have the IT staff needed to run secure networks. Neither do many big companies, judging by news reports of various cyber breakins that show up on slashdot regularly. It is not easy to keep on top of every emerging threat from outside or inside. So from a liability perspective, on might argue the school is safer with Google Apps.
Trying to run a local system well also may cost schools a lot of money that will then not go to other educational purposes.
Even when school networks are secure, they can be misused by school staff, such as in the articles a year or so back about a school using laptop webcams to spy on students. Of course, a Google Apps administrator can also read all email under the domain for any account.
I guess maybe the biggest issue is that, as John Taylor Gatto says, "Schooling is a form of adoption": ...".
http://www.the-open-boat.com/Gatto.html
"Schooling is a form of adoption. You give your kid up in his or her most plastic years to a group of strangers. You accept a promise, sometimes stated and more often implied that the state through its agents knows better how to raise your children and educate them than you, your neighbors, your grandparents, your local traditions do. And that your kid will be better off so adopted.
But by the time the child returns to the family, or has the option of doing that, very few want to. Their parents are some form of friendly stranger too and why not? In the key hours of growing up, strangers have reared the kid.
Now let's look at the strangers of which you (interviewer) was one and I was one. Regardless of our good feeling toward children. Regardless of our individual talents or intelligence, we have so little time each day with each of these kids, we can't possibly know enough vital information about that particular kid to tailor a set of exercises for that kid. Oh, you know, some of us will try more than others, but there simply isn't any time to do it to a significant degree.
Why did you let your daughter be thus adopted, and pay $30K a year for the privilege?
Also, sure, some paper could be used against her in a political career. But there is always something. And if it is not findable, people could just make it up. And everyone makes mistakes. So, yes, it could be an issue, but how big an issue may depend itself on power issues. Sometimes trying to dig up this stuff backfires, too. Remember, Hilary Clinton herself used to be a conservative. Did it really hurt her political future with democrats?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Clinton#Wellesley_College_years
"In 1965, Rodham enrolled at Wellesley College, where she majored in political science.[16] During her freshman year, she served as president of the Wellesley Young Republicans;[17][18] with this Rockefeller Republican-oriented group,[19] she supported the elections of John Lindsay and Edward Brooke.[20] She later stepped down from this position, as her views changed regarding the American Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War.[17]'"
Tthe NSA and who knows who else apparently snoops on everything. An (older) kid probably has a facebook profile or other online presence. So, in that regard, focusing on internet privacy in schools may be focusing on the less important issue, even if your points may be 100% valid as far as they go.
If you want freedom for your kid long term, you could advocate for stuff like a basic income to level the social playing field instead of compulsory schooling.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_guarantee
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
And find no big difference between MS and Google concerning IT in education. They both behave as dope peddlers [*] on the schoolyard. First they give it away for free. Once the youngsters are addicted, the cash flows in. [*] As Tom Lehrer so eloquently explained in his 1'42" song "The Old Dope Peddler" in 1959. If you don't know the song or the artist, well, why not Google (or Bing) for it?
'Why is "bringing about paranoia" a problem?'
Seriously. I do research with human subjects. If I don't have at least some people choose to decline participation at the point of informed consent, then I assume my consent isn't good enough - participating in any given research project is *always* not a good choice for at least one person.
Then again, you have the interesting situation that formal school-based education is not the correct solution for every single human; using google apps (or whatever cloud-based system a school is considering) is not the correct situation for every child, yet in both cases the benefits to society (shared childhood experience, guaranteed minimum education level; cheaper infrastructure) may wildly outweigh the relatively minor risks for the individuals.
You are aware of these "risks" that you so cavalierly dismiss? I'd say err on the side of safety - if you must have children access cloud services, do so under a proxied account wholly controlled by the school, and regularly switch and delete content. If a single account cannot be tied to an individual reliably, then all data will most likely be "bad". But even so - the data itself is worth something to someone, and should probably not be available to them at all. This whole thing gives me shivers of 1984, Brave New World and Gattaca.
As for paranoia - you're not paranoid if they are watching you - and apparently "they" are, all the time, everywhere you go. At least that's the assumption I'm going with until that's proven incorrect. Given the current headlines that doesn't seem unreasonable anymore. And I used to think some people were paranoid.... What a simpler time that was.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
The privacy issue isn't one we've given huge amounts of thought to, partly because I doubt even the NAS cares much about a story about a hungry rabbit written by a ten-year-old, but mainly because the issues with their use of mobiles, social media, gaming etc. strike us as much more serious, at least at their current age.