"Digital classroom tools raise privacy concerns" by Jessica Meyers | Globe Staff September 14, 2014
WASHINGTON — Many of the nation’s schools lack restrictions on the unprecedented student data amassed by education technology companies, an omission that has worried parents and prompted legislative proposals from statehouses to Congress.
I hope no perverts are working for them.
This data collection transforms how teachers interact with their students and gives researchers a new understanding of how youths learn. But some fear it comes at a cost, allowing firms to profit from sensitive information.
That's the AmeriKan way in the 21st-century, and the kids have been prepared for it through school and smartphone.
These tensions continue to build as the federal government encourages technology in schools, reinforcing an ongoing struggle between privacy assurances and digital innovation.
Control, control, they must have control! Besides, makes it easier for the NSA to snoop.
“Parents are right to ask, ‘Who holds the information to this website and what are they gathering about my kid?’ ” said Tracy Novick, a Worcester School Committee member who limits the online activities of her three school-age daughters at home.
What is there to worry about? Government is protecting your kid. That's what all the politically-correct curriculum of inculcation and indoctrination is about, as well as the lies sending them off to war.
Fewer than 7 percent of districts that contract with cloud-service providers restrict the sale or marketing of student information, according to a report by Fordham Law School’s Center on Law and Information Privacy, and 20 percent fail to create policies that govern online services at all.
Vendors have not been caught reselling student information, but experts warn it could happen without notice.
Ah, the bu$ine$$ of ejewkhazion.
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Google has agreed to stop scanning students’ Gmail accounts for advertising reasons after users sued the company. The search giant accessed the information through its free Apps for Education service.
The Federal Trade Commission intervened this May in the bankruptcy case of Boston-based ConnectEDU, which uses interactive tools to help students choose careers. It warned the proposed sale of 20 million student records could leave the information up for grabs. And inBloom, a nonprofit funded partly by Microsoft founder Bill Gates, shut down this spring after complaints it would create a student database ripe for identity theft.
Well, government is the hackers, so....
The Department of Education, meanwhile, has worked to clarify the main federal law on student privacy, passed in an era of typewriters and paper records. But the agency’s latest guidelines on whether such protections extend online begins with, “It depends.”
States have drafted more than 100 bills on student data privacy this year, according to the Data Quality Campaign, a Washington, D.C., advocacy group that promotes effective use of data in education.
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Companies point to technology’s potential to improve education.
I'm not knocking technology; I'm knocking those that control it. It frightens me to think what a controlled idiot lefty I might still be had I not found the Internet and learned the real truth of so many things. I shudder thinking I would still be believing the shit paper.
They are “actually measuring what is going on and using that to make school better,” said Aaron Feuer, who cofounded Cambridge-based Panorama Education in 2012 as a college student and has since received $4 million from investors, including Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. The company works to improve feedback between students, parents, and districts.
In other words, these are intelligence agency platforms to collect data because it is now well-known that is what is Facebook.
These kinds of businesses now make it possible to catch a teenager on the verge of dropping out or learn why a middle-schooler can’t comprehend adverbs.
Always about bu$ine$$ in AmeriKa, even the ejewkhazional in$titutions.
And you wonder why I'm tired, so damn tired, of doing this?
“We don’t want to take away the tools that help teachers,” said Paige Kowalski, the state policy and advocacy director for the Data Quality Campaign.
We will just cut the budgets.
Senator Edward J. Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, sought to address concerns in late July when he and Senator Orrin Hatch, a Utah Republican, unveiled a student privacy bill.
Some groups, including the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy, attacked the legislation for not doing enough, and much of the software industry labeled it unnecessary.
The bill aims to update the federal law, known as the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, through clearer prohibitions against marketing students’ personal information.
“We have to make sure this business of storing and sifting through the records of students is going as fast as students are,” Markey said. “But we also need to ensure there is simultaneously an increase in privacy and security protections.”
Officials have started to take note....
After the horse is out of the barn.
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