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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 benefits are indeed obvious, as long as you trust the people holding the data....
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
No, it's just that privatization has become incredibly normalized, and the idea of pushing out government duties to contractors(and the potential abuse that entails) is second nature nowadays. If you honestly think this is the only time student records got entered into a third party system without consideration of the effects, I've got some minor's personal data to sell you.
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.
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?
More likely they were just high. It's ridiculous to think that what works for kids in Florida works for kids in Hawaii, or what works for kids in Arizona works for kids in New York. This kind of data is just meant for tracking, it wouldn't be used to improve a thing.
That's why they include location data.
Really: the goals are pretty good -- use machine learning to get the correlations instead of depending on the all-too-fallible "common sense". The problem is, the goals and the implementation are only loosely related. The researchers are trying to do the right thing, but in the process they're creating a database that can be abused intentionally or inadvertently for other goals. There's a reason HIPAA exists; this system would not just do an end-run around HIPAA, it would do much more. This data would become one of the most valuable assets to many corporations and government agencies in the US (and beyond).
Teachers and vice principals have been warning students that their misbehaving and bad attitude were going on their permanent record for decades.
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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.
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?"
Exactly that.
If.
No, when.
Somewhere 5-10 years downstream, some politician/NYPD-chief will use the next Sandy Hook event to say "We had the troubling information in the school's database, but we couldn't use it. Let's change the law".
And we all know it's going to happen at some point.
I'm not a complete idiot... Some parts are missing.
Done right - yes, the kids.
Education is not done at the moment in general in a rational manner.
The process is typically that a politician gets an idea. (which they may even believe).
They then either implement this in their area of influence, or if they are especially progressive, do a poorly setup trial, which they then ignore before rolling it out.
The problem is things that seem reasonable often produce the exact opposite result.
Take for example 'Scared Straight' programs - where troubled teens are taken on prison visits, to see what future awaits them and to help turn their life around. Seems obvious it'll work, so nobody checked. ... found that youth who participate in Scared Straight and other similar deterrence programs have higher recidivism rates than youth in control groups.'
Unfortunately, when they did:
'A study by Anthony Petrosino and researchers at the Campbell Collaboration analyzed results from nine Scared Straight programs and found that such programs generally increased crime up to 28 percent in the experimental group when compared to a no-treatment control group.
There is real debate as to the best way to teach kids to read.
Proper statistics measuring outcomes for each way answers this.
Should this data ever be available outside education, and should there be extreme penalties for using such data in such contexts as insurance- of course not, and yes!.
(I'd start at a million dollars per offence)
https://www.ncjrs.gov/html/ojj...