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Parents Mobilize Against States' Student Data Mining
theodp writes 'Politico reports that parents have mobilized into an unexpected political force to fight the data mining of their children, catapulting student privacy to prominence in statehouses. Having already torpedoed the $100 million, Bill Gates-funded inBloom database project, which could have made it easier for schools to share confidential student records with private companies, the amateur activists are now rallying against another perceived threat: huge state databases being built to track children for more than two decades, from as early as infancy through the start of their careers. "The Education Department," writes Stephanie Simon, "lists hundreds of questions that it urges states to answer about each child in the public school system: Did she make friends easily as a toddler? Was he disciplined for fighting as a teen? Did he take geometry? Does she suffer from mental illness? Did he go to college? Did he graduate? How much does he earn?" Leonie Haimson, a NY mother who is organizing a national Parent Coalition for Student Privacy says, "Every parent I've talked to has been horrified. We just don't want our kids tracked from cradle to grave." For their part, ed tech entrepreneurs and school reformers are both bewildered by and anxious about the backlash — and struggling to craft a response, having assumed parents would support their vision: to mine vast quantities of data for insights into what's working, and what's not, for individual students and for the education system as a whole. "People took for granted that parents would understand [the benefits], that it was self-evident," said Michael Horn, a co-founder an education think tank."
Facebook's evil laughter as their monopoly on distributing childrens' personal information becomes secure from local governments inadvertent competition. Elsewhere a "marketing expert" begins the process to pony up an extra half-cent per human being whose privacy is permanently and irrevocably destroyed.
the American Dangan cometh
Is it possible they were so high in their walled garden that they couldn't perceive or predict possible backlash?
The benefits are indeed obvious, as long as you trust the people holding the data....
Not the kids, that's for damn sure.
huge state databases being built to track children for more than two decades, from as early as infancy through the start of their careers
2 decades? Try the rest of their lives.
Get 'em young, make 'em yours before they learn what "dissent" means.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
You'll have marketers lining up around the block, state educators lining their own pockets with the cash, law enforcement combing through the data for parallel reconstruction purposes, hackers stealing identities for credit card fraud.
What a hugely stupid idea.
Anyone who thought that the virtues of this scheme would be 'self-evident' must be a real pleasure to deal with... I'm just curious whether it's the cluelessness or the arrogance that you notice first.
Benefits, my hind parts! Protect your children's information.
STASI type surveillance, over-present security forces. Cops in kindergartens, schools and grocery stores.
This story is for sure about some North country.
Hey - He's the one
Who provides us all our funds
And he likes to track our young
And he likes data by the ton
But he knows not what it means
Don't know what it means, when I say:
Every educator that I have known has acted with positive intent and a genuine desire to make the lives of future generations better. People do not go into education, especially in public schools, because they want to get rich or amass influence and personal power. They do so because they are gluttons for punishment and believe that it is their duty as human beings to make the world a better place.
As a society, we see our data being used against us. Where as the educators are trying to track the effectiveness of their programs, citizens are fearful of the data being mined for nefarious purposes. Some things that come to mind are, increased healthcare premiums / denial of coverage. Denied job opportunities due to invasive background screening. I am sure that the concerns that people have are numerous.
The other side of the equation is compelling though. If the educators are gathering data that showing people who failed or never took geometry end up making 50% less more than students who do pass geometry, they will more than likely look to tailor the curriculum to help students develop the skills and abilities required to pass geometry.
The other issue is monetization of data. Nobody wants to be a product, especially if they are not receiving any benefits. To use the geometry example above, if the data sets are being mined to extrapolate data like, "Students who pass geometry are 50% more likely to purchase a luxury automobile." and that data is then sold to marketers to target Facebook advertising, people are going to be understandably upset.
It all comes down to trust. Even if the educators can prove that their intentions are pure, what about the third parties they engage? What if the third party is initially pure, but then they go bankrupt and the personal data is sold as part of the liquidation of the company? Who is going to control what the fourth party does with it?
If you fail to document yourself to a lot of people during your educational process, I can't hire you.
It's none of your damned business! Butt out!
+1 for the homeschooling movement: home schooling won't track you like a foreign NSA subject and make you subject to other's subjectivist opinions for all your life. I'm waiting for the next gen kids who really get it. Instead of hacking the school computer to change their grades, their going to hack the school computer to ERASE them. I wonder what the black market will price such services at?
Both sides are right: Assuming it wasn't misused, it would be an excellent way to datamine by computer what things work and don't, for a variety of home issues and problems.
If it isn't misused.
If.
I can see CSI: Nosy Neighbors TV show, questioning a guy, "According to your school info, you have trouble making friends and once pulled up a girl's skirt. You murdered Mr. Body, didn't you?"
No, the temptation for this info to be datamined by companies or worse, government officials dealing with uppity troublemakers, is too great IMO.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Teachers and vice principals have been warning students that their misbehaving and bad attitude were going on their permanent record for decades.
.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
Oh, I think that the parents understand the benefits fairly well. They just realize that they don't accrue to them or their children.
"People took for granted that parents would understand [the benefits], that it was self-evident," said Michael Horn,
I'm sure they do. The benefits are self-evident. It is the people who have been advancing these programs who are lacking foresight, for not considering the costs.
The problem is not that these programs have no value, it is that the cost is large and not well understood, and that once built it is very hard to make these things go away. As a society we have not begun to seriously examine the threat of these massive databases. Recent big data research has shown us the approximate threat level: In terms of influence power, it is "very big, larger than even the researchers expected."
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
What's missing from the conversation is how internet surveillance data is actually used by real companies in the real world. The truth is shocking but we almost never hear about it. Here's an article from a UK satirical investigative journalism periodical:
"Eyespy
Dodgy data deals
SILICON Roundabout is the groovy name for the UK tech sector, backed with taxpayer cash through Big Society organisations like Tech City Investment Organisation and the Technology Strategy Board and estimated to be worth £225bn, or 12% of GDP, by 2016. But since almost all this will come from "big data" - information gathered for marketing purposes - our blossoming industry might more accurately be called Surveillance Roundabout.
Between them, consumer intelligence companies, credit reporting agencies and data marketing firms hold detailed and current information on almost the entire population. They often suffer data breaches at the hands of hackers, who then use the loot (name, address, national insurance number, etc) for identity theft and fraud. Since there is no law requiring big data companies to reveal hacking or even use encryption, it usually gets covered up. Only when the damage is massive do we see it in the news, as was the case with Experian, Barclays, Lexis-Nexis and Equifax recently.
Besides safekeeping, such an intrusive industry raises another question: is sensitive personal information now mere merchandise? Most UK data brokers have sense enough to hide their creepier practices, but there are exceptions. Clear Data Ltd, based in Herefordshire, advertises lists of old people ("over 65 and mostly female") waiting to be targeted by quack doctors, boiler room conmen, telephone raffle operators, and pyramid schemers in need of credulous targets. Data Broker Limited, from Cheshire, caters to predatory lenders — "[if you're] offering new loans to people With poor credit history and [county court Judgments against them], Databroker have the largest list related to loans for postal, telephone, mobile, SMS, email and social media campaigns".
The company also provides lists of consumers who "seek online relationships". If you can't get a loan or a shag, we'll let the right people know. Or if you're struggling with a betting habit, a firm like the Data Octopus of Manchester might pass on your details in one of its databases of habitual gamblers.
While Washington is looking hard at Silicon Valley data brokers in the US, a recent Senate inquiry describing them as secretive and opaque, the chances of scrutiny here look slim, even though some of the biggest companies directly named in the inquiry report — Epsilon, Experian and Acxiom — also operate extensively in the UK.
UK politicians love getting into bed with trendy tech companies — David Cameron has extensive connections with Google, the tax-dodging behemoth whose revenue model is data surveillance. And how many of our legislators and regulators know anything about the web? Judging by how the Data Protection Act is taken as a joke by techies and as a useless tool by prosecutors, few indeed."
Source: Private Eye, No. 1632, 21st March - 3rd April, 2014, Page 31.
Let's say they start datamining and storing whether or not a child has received mental health care. Then what? Kids and their parents will prevent their children from getting the needed health care in order to prevent their child from being classified as 'aberrant' by what is well-known to be an inconsistent psychological practices.
Even worse. It will hurt redemption stories. In my own experience, I probably had too much fun when I was a kid. My grades were good but my friends were a varied lot, and some of them were not well-regarded by The Powers That Be (note I was in a small town, nails that stick out get hammered down). But I got wise, worked hard and smart on my education, and I'm doing well for myself. Would this have been possible if I were tracked during high school and automatically relegated to 'one of those ruffians?'
The parents are right to complain about this, much more harm than good comes from it.
"Who are you?" "No one of consequence." "I must know." "Get used to disappointment."
...
Most teachers have a 50 year career. With statistics collected on every student the most effective teachers could be identified. These teachers could be recruited to teach the next generation of teachers. Somehow it seems that educators see every child as a unique snowflake and any information collected on the education of that child will be useless for the other 54 million students in the country.
It's the twenty-first century, you have no privacy, ask Donald Sterling. At least we can put that information to good use.
OTOH humanities [majors] understand paragraphs, formatting, presentation, etc.
Had to stop reading because it was too painful to wade through your wall of text.
RE: even though real research indicates that adolescents do not function as well as adolescents at that hour.
And this contradiction is supposed to mean what exactly?
etc.
Here we have parents who have come to know that their offspring has defects and wants a situation where truth is buried so that their brat will get out of the house and have less need to borrow money from them for the rest of their lives. Being that morality is a strange notion to them it does not occur that people with the best life record should be rewarded by society to a greater degree than people who, one way or another, are a mess. Yes some employers are creeps but some are not. And the employer who supports society by rewarding kids who have done well in school and had far fewer issues than the average kid get hired and promoted much faster than lesser folks. Assume that the data on two individuals is so close that one can not be told from the other. But one had a drunk driving arrest at the age of 14 when he swiped his mom's car. Which person should get the job at the age of 25? Everything counts for everybody every time. In the old days a wealthy family could cover up for a defective teen. Those days are vanishing. Now individuals may actually have to compete with other individuals with a lot more facts being known about everyone involved.
That everyone seems to be clamoring for data is reason enough to distrust the motives of those engaged in the endeavor.
Guess the guys should have thought what the benefits but also drawbacks and costs are. Not only for them, but for all people involved.
I want you to know that this will go down on your permanent record.
Oh, yeah? Well, don't get so distressed. Did I happen to mention that I'm impressed?
Glad I'm a beta, would hate to be alphaware. Now is that beta like slashdot or beta like google?
eDNA? No, you really shouldn't. If your citizens are incapable of understanding the reality they live in, dumbing it down to the point of being blatantly false isn't going to help.
Though in this case, I suspect that the more appropriate word is "hoped", as in "hoped they wouldn't notice or find out."
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Sounds like a good way to determine who is useful, compliant and deserves to live. Round the rest up and kill em. YAY, AMERICA!
So I find it interesting that in a story about the tracking of all of the children's data by "big data", the provided link has an embedded tracking feature:
You know what the "?hp=l7" is? The source of the link. Without it, the page still loads, which means it's purely a tracking token.
So either the poster was too lazy/unaware to remove it, or someone is participating in an affiliate program. Seriously, Slashdot should be stripping this crap out, and be aware enough to understand WTF it is. Your job is to post links, which means you should understand the mechanics of them.
And, more on topic, I'm glad to see parents finally realizing the implications of school boards handing over the private data of children to private companies in exchange for shiny baubles. The long-term privacy implications of that are absolutely terrifying, and the practice should be illegal.
Schools should not be providing this data to anybody, let alone for-profit entities.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.