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Parents' Privacy Concerns Kill 'Personalized Learning' Initiative
theodp writes: "You may recall that inBloom is a data initiative that sought to personalize learning. GeekWire's Tricia Duryee now reports that inBloom, which was backed by $100 million from The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and others, is closing up shop after parents worried that its database technology was violating their children's privacy. According to NY Times coverage (reg.), the inBloom database tracked 400 different data fields about students — including family relationships ('foster parent' or 'father's significant other') and reasons for enrollment changes ('withdrawn due to illness' or 'leaving school as a victim of a serious violent incident') — that parents objected to, prompting some schools to recoil from the venture. In a statement, inBloom CEO Iwan Streichenberger said that personalized learning was still an emerging concept, and complained that the venture had been 'the subject of mischaracterizations and a lightning rod for misdirected criticism.' He added, 'It is a shame that the progress of this important innovation has been stalled because of generalized public concerns about data misuse, even though inBloom has world-class security and privacy protections that have raised the bar for school districts and the industry as a whole.' [Although it was still apparently vulnerable to Heartbleed.] Gates still has a couple of irons left in the data-driven personalized learning fire via his ties to Code.org, which seeks 7 years of participating K-12 students' data, and Khan Academy, which recently attracted scrutiny over its data-privacy policies."
I already feared that every parent of today is on the "total surveillance" trip, teaching their children to kneel before their corporate overlords from their infancy.
But then again, maybe those parents were only concerned about the collecting of data associated with themselves, not their children...
He can grow 'em in tanks, for his personal slave army.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Every so often, a little glimmer of good news comes my way. This would be one of them!
Spoken like a clueless teen, right down to the diction.In your case , you are probably right.
The rest of the world recalls what works and what doesnt. The newer ways, tailored to fit the convenience of teachers, board , the few liberal parents and now a data collection scam dressed as a Gates Charity, do not work, did not work and will not work. Bringing the focus back to the student, adopting the ways of schools from the 1930s to the 1950s and only updating newer facts for texts is going to be THE SOLUTION. Dont forget, eliminate unions and tenure, relax the need for teaching degrees and allow degrees from other fields to teach, then we will get somewhere besides the worst schools in the world.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Somebody has already cooked up a term for that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
You're no longer paranoid. Being concerned about your privacy became just a wee bit more fashionable. Why surrender more data to Big Data that will only end up in the data dungeons of the three letter agencies?
'It is a shame that the progress of this important innovation has been stalled because of generalized public concerns about data misuse,'
OK, so quit whining and fix it. Go talk to Bill and Melinda and ask them to fund some lobbying to get privacy laws with sharp teeth put in place. Simple laws that say something like, "Any company says they won't abuse your data gets shut down and all their assets siezed if they sell, transfer, share with a parter, or in any other way distribute your data, or if they sell the use of your data as a service, or use your data for any purpose or in any way other than what is explicitly stated on the front page of their web site, above the fold, in bold 14 point type."
All we want is to be able to trust you. Since it would be silly to trust an American company that didn't have its financial ass on the line, what we need is for your financial future to be directly coupled to you doing what you claim you were going to do anyway. Put your money where your mouth is; if you're not trying to pull something, it won't cost you a thing.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Well, knowing that amount of information about the children extends well to the parents.
The organization response does appear to be tone-deaf. I wouldn't care if they had perfect security. I care about what they're going to do with the information.
Don't give them your data... have them give you the engine.
Then you feed the data into it locally, and it generates a customized learning profile which is anonymoized.
Then you anonymously download profile XJ2221LP4-123 whatever and then you get the best of both worlds.
Why are people so stupid... its so fucking easy.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
...how many of these 'concerned parents' are spewing that same data daily over facebook, without a care?
Tangentially related: the other day, my neighbour called up her niece concerned - facebook update informed her that both she and her mother had went to a hospital, and had been there for a few hours. The niece's opening response: "who told you?". She was convinced someone blabbed, when all along was 'use geolocation services' or some such on their phones. They simply had no idea what information they were freely handing out. Have to wonder if some kids had tried to sneak into a bar before, only for their phones to rat them out.
Excuse me while guesstimate the hypocrisy inherent in them refusing something that actually might be of (good) use.
But the simple fact that between US corporations and the US government, privacy abuses have been so bad (although admittedly still better than some other countries) that there is no chance people would willingly opt into any such system. Even if the current incarnation is honest, there is 0% chance that it will stay that way, for one reason or another.
Everyone older than a teenager should remember the whole Google 'do no evil' thing, and many of us honestly hoped that they would stay that way. Unfortunately, reality had a way of crushing Google's desires to be honest and innocent, and to make a long story short they now they play hard ball just like everybody else.
The idea is great. But the reality would have never worked. Just like both Communism and Democracy.
First of all, the summary is misleading. It wasn't parents that "shut this down" (and that would simply happen by parents not utilizing the service in the first place). It was the governments that own and operate the schools. The passed laws that will not allow the schools to share the data in the first place. Big difference. Especially since there was no breach. Nothing "bad" happened to warrant this ruling.
Whether this has always the case, or is simply more apparent in this day and age, I'm not sure. But at this point in time, public schools are operated by cowards. I'm talking about the school boards and superintendents who operate the school districts at the highest levels (where these kinds of decisions are made). I'm talking about everything from their policies regarding "threats" (like how you hear in the news about 10 year olds being suspended from school because they made their fingers into the shape of a gun and made a sound), to locking down schools with video cameras at the entrances so parents have to show their ID and be buzzed in just to have lunch with their child. An event happens at one school in the entire nation, and suddenly that is somehow a realistic threat to that every other school in the nation too. It's because those operating the schools at the highest levels are cowards. They say they have "zero tolerance" for many things now (like the whole "gun" threat nonsense), which really means "We absolve ourselves from having to think or make decisions in any way, so that we, the school board, have zero liability at all in the event, no matter how remote, that something bad happens at our schools." Cowards .
Now this whole inBloom thing, whether a good idea or not, is dead because of those cowards. Parents no longer have this option, in the 21st century, to simply consolidate their children's educational data to a single 3rd party service. Why? Because school officials, in their fear and ignorance, assume that somehow it's all going to be breached - and here's the key part - and that they will be responsible and bear some degree of liability.
Better known as 318230.
I agree that it is good to hear.
I would also add that it is actually dirt simple for companies to assure "security" of this kind of personal data: all they have to do is not collect it in the first place.
The organization response does appear to be tone-deaf. I wouldn't care if they had perfect security. I care about what they're going to do with the information.
Exactly... And being US based, you can't trust what they say anyway, because they can be legally order to lie to you.
It really, doesn't matter what they say... At the end of the day, the US doesn't have a legal framework to support safe use of private data for good, without risks that it may end up at NSA (or big insurance companies).
Closing this was the only way, given the current political landscape in the US big data is never safe.
Well, I think the problem with a lot of people not being concerned about privacy is because, we've all already had our data stolen. Most people didn't even know it was a "thing" until it was too late. Kind of like going to church or exercising. As an adult you think back "I wish I had gone to church or exercised instead of doing all that coke and killing that hooker... hey... I could make my kid do it the right way though!" and viola...
We were fighting it like crazy and it was our kids' data we were concerned about. One of the big problems was that it wasn't opt-in. It wasn't even opt-out. It was "the government has decreed that parents aren't allowed to opt out." So you couldn't make an informed decision about InBloom. Your child's data was going there whether you liked it or not. Add in the fact that InBloom stated that they would release the data to "third parties" and you can see why parents like my wife and I were fighting it as much as we could.
We were happy to hear that InBloom was being shut down. The only problem with the shut down? What about the data that was already uploaded? Who is getting that and what are they going to use it for?
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
They retained the right to sell information to third parties. So that data on your child that you couldn't opt out of giving inBloom could go to some marketing agency so they could sell something better to your child.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
FTA:-
Wow. Sounds like a gross invasion of privacy. If I was the student, I wouldn't want my teacher to know that I was a "victim of a serious violent incident". Not to mention once this kind of data gets into a database, its pretty dang hard to get it permanently scrubbed. So, what do the students get out of giving away their personal details?
Do teachers really need all this information to teach effectively? Do teachers even have the time to prowl through these thick databases to "tailor" their teaching methods? And what's wrong with teachers getting this information they need the old fashioned way -by winning the trust and confidence of the student/parent and being told directly? And is the student's teacher the only one privy to this information?
Even more fundamentally, it is fair to pigeonhole the students, each of whom are unique individuals with their own feelings, drives, desires and motivations into anonymous datasets and discrete categories so that they can be dealt with by the numbers?
This initiative seems to have been very badly thought out. Humans are not machines.
So they got caught with their pants down, okay. Not the first group this happened to.
It would be better to hear their logic for collecting this data to begin with. If they wanted personalized learning, I'm pretty sure a student ID unique to each student make more sense than gathering data on parents, their partners, reasons they missed class, etc...?
If they really and truly only wanted to help personalize learning why not trim off the data people took issue with? They obviously wanted that data more than they want to really wanted help people.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
I'm sure the data will be of interest to any individual or organization targeting vulnerable children, and their fearful parents.
Some possibilities off the top of my head:-
Quacks selling miracle cures for sick children.
Organisations selling therapy/schemes/camps/training for out of control children.
Quasi-religious entities recruiting impressionable members.
Criminal organizations seeking malleable stooges.
Adults seeking children with less adult supervision for more nefarious activities.
In contrast, marketing would be the least of my concerns, actually.
The ultimate poison pill for any startup company. This would effectively prohibit any future funding or merger. "Gee, guys, you have a great idea and we'd love to buy you out to bring your idea to a larger audience, but our lawyers won't let us assume the liability of dealing with your data."
You're overlooking the fact that if there was such a law, it would apply to everyone, not just startups. Want to deal with existing established companies? Same problem. So now you have the interesting choice of either accepting the risk, or leaving the market entirely.
And there will be some companies who are willing to accept the risk, provided the rewards are commensurate.
...how many of these 'concerned parents' are spewing that same data daily over facebook, without a care?
She was convinced someone blabbed, when all along was 'use geolocation services' or some such on their phones. They simply had no idea what information they were freely handing out.
You contradict yourself. First you claim that the parents spew data "without a care". But in your example, the niece clearly did care about the loss of data, she was simply technologically inept at securing her phone.
And, even that is understandable. Frankly speaking, can you honestly claim that you know and approve of every bit of data that leaves your phone? That you are fully conversant and familiar with the multitude of information that is being broadcasted from your phone, right this minute, by the OS, the various apps, the underlying hardware itself?
Hypocrisy is also evident when you accuse others of sins being committed by yourself.
And beyond that, it doesn't matter what they say or how sincere they are today. Tomorrow they may unilaterally change the agreement without notice. Why the courts don't shred any contract claiming that right, I don't know.
The problem is who owns the data. The deep secret about your 'permanent record' that principals talk about when you're in school is that once you graduate, they sit on paper in a disused basement until destroyed by floods, fire, or rats. Perhaps these days they sit on tapes that become unreadable even sooner.
The good news is that they don't get sold to credit agencies, insurance companies or other lowlifes. Even if they wanted to sell it, they can't. It's just too hard to retrieve.
The harm of collecting it all under some 3rd party that pinkie swears it won't misuse the data is that it will, sooner or later, be quietly sold to those lowlifes I mentioned.
The government (and their private sector lobbyists) has made it quite clear that they don't give a shit about anyone's rights or privacy. Parents have a right to be concerned. These days there is a 'permanent record', and with ever growing numbers of data points being added, the probability of having your career torpedoed for out-of-context events that happened decades ago is growing radically.
We don't need more tracking for a goverment to abuse.
Which, of course, it is not, that still leaves the entirely reasonable objection that they have the data for any reason at all. Why should they be trusted with it?
In order to ascertain whether a learning program works well the first item needed is solid testing so that you know where a child is at in his learning path. Sadly efforts to do real testing get sabotaged by the powers that be. For example we have the F-Cat testing which is sort of an anti learning device. The reason it is negative is that schools know what will be on the tests and when the tests will take place. The S.A.T. tests have suffered a similar fate. These days it is normal to study for the S.A.T. exams and the announced date of the testing is made known well in advance. That negates the entire testing process. Imagine that a whistle blows and the school is informed that the test is right now. Imagine that the test is confined to one, narrow subject. Further there a numerous versions of tests for each subject such that study in advance simply can not be done. This way you can quickly and easily find out what a student knows in a particular subject. The next semester the probability would be that an entirely different subject would be thrust at the students. This would allow inexpensive and fast testing and no group could gain an edge by simply hiring a specialized tutor or buying focused books on the tests. So this year little Johny happened to be tested on long division. Both Johny and his school can be evaluated on the students ability to do long division. Next year it might be grammar or geography. The truth is that schools do not want their real success to be known just as the city mayor also does not want the quality of the school to be known.
These parents are idiots. I found their kids on Facebook, as well as the candy van stalkers that have been trying to meet up with them.
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It would be better to hear their logic for collecting this data to begin with. If they wanted personalized learning, I'm pretty sure a student ID unique to each student make more sense than gathering data on parents, their partners, reasons they missed class, etc...?
Yeah, cause you can tell so much about a person by an arbitrarily assigned ID. The ID tells you all you need to know about what kinds of learning materials might work best for someone, or what wouldn't be appropriate. Yeah, you know from the ID that a child is in a single parent home so you might want to tailor the material towards examples that he will be familiar with (because you also know that the student is a boy from his student ID.)
And when the next arbitrarily assigned ID shows up on the system, you can tell from just the ID that this girl (which you know because of the ID, of course) is in a similar situation as half a dozen other students (which you know by just matching IDs, of course) and would be better served by materials similar to the ones that work well for them.
The whole concept of personalized education is that YOU NEED TO KNOW THINGS ABOUT THE PERSON YOU ARE EDUCATING so you can, you know, personalize it. In the Good Old Days of single room schoolhouses the teacher knew every student and the parents and kept a database in his head. In the online world that means the database is ...
They obviously wanted that data more than they want to really wanted help people.
Yeah. Obvious. It couldn't be because the entire concept of what they were doing is based on knowing things about the student so they can, you know, personalize the education.
The standardized testing systems are being criticized because they assume a common cultural knowledge and some students don't do well because they don't have that experience. An impersonal test asks Billy the farmer's son the same kind of story problems it asks Martha the single-mom-in-the-tenement-house's daughter. If you're going to remove those biases in the tests (and in the education behind them) you need to know "where does Billy/Martha live?", "parents?", "income?", etc.
Given that the uploaded data would have included IEP information (including medical diagnoses), disciplinary information, and even teen pregnancy information, all those would have been possible.
Of course, InBloom has been shut down but some of the data had been uploaded. What happened to that data? Who has it now and will it be deleted or used for "other purposes"?
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
You are telling me it's impossible to gauge someone's knowledge or tailor learning to something like testing and progression, and you have to know who a kids parent is sleeping with? Seriously, hold that thought a minute.
Hahaha, haha, hahahaha, OMFG! Hahahaha.
Okay, sorry. Have a nice day sir.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Let's see, FERPA
It only applies to organizations receiving DOE funds. OH, and it seems it got loosened up a bit in 2012.
So yes, it's a pinkie swear.
Sit down son, Ill dismiss thoughts from fools based on my experience and observation. This includes dipshits like you spouting lefty regurgitation without a thought as to what you are saying. I notice you were too squeamish to do this with your account. Why should I take you seriously at all? Are you afraid you might get modded down for your silly tantrum? You may even feel silly to find that I am not right wing. I just live in a REAL world where children are undereducated by spoiled fuckheads more concerned about their own quality of life than doing their job, in a country that puts more into education and gets less out of it than anywhere in the world. We are on the bottom and it is dipshits like you that keep us there.
Shortage or not, it may be time to separate the teachers from the slackers. Unions may work for teachers, but the power of the union works against the children for whom the schools are about. Unions add unnecessary costs to goods and services and contribute significantly to inflation. Most of us work jobs in which we are hired and work AT WILL. Do you know what that means? It means we have to do our jobs and be satisfactory workers or we lose our job. Consequently, we do a good job and care. Not so with Union babies, there is always the promise of litigation adding to already overrun costs, quality goes down, in this case it affects childrens education. Tenure is too stupid to discuss.
If you do not like working a teaching job with no more security than the majority of the population, perhaps you should have realized that teaching probably is not the easy cop out job you thought it was. You cant foist the problem off on curriculum as being too hard for students, we have the mushiest curriculum in the world thanks to the Teachers associations, who actually have a say.
Adopting the older methods of teaching ensures children will get a superior education to the ones you an I had. If you cannot grasp that, there is no reason to create a cartoon scenario to cover your ignorance as in your post. Our grandparents and even parents had FAR more knowledge pumped into their skulls than the current situation is even prepared to do. They also had discipline and virtually no violence. Troublemakers were even expelled from public school and LEFT BEHIND, which is alright, because the world always needs cheap manual labor and no drag on the students who WILL learn and cooperate with educational programs. Slow students were held back to try again to learn required material, this wasnt a social issue, it was an educational issue. We didnt sacrifice the students who WANTED an education to lighten the load for some future gangbanger and improve statistics for newsmedia and other liars. We used to educate.
Perhaps you should review your feeble spew and quit imagining you know anything about the world. You only seem to know what youre told to say by your peers.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
If they "personalize" learning the same way Facebook "personalizes" ads. Then I don't blame them for not wanting it.
while