Slashdot Mirror
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— including family relationships ('foster parent' or 'father's significant other') and reasons for enrollment changes ('withdrawn due to illness' or 'leaving school as a victim of a serious violent incident') — that parents objected to, prompting some schools to recoil from the venture.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...
Every so often, a little glimmer of good news comes my way. This would be one of them!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
...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.
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.