Note from Leonie
On the Threats to Student Privacy  Our note of the week today comes from Leonie Haimson, who serves on the NPE's Board of Directors.
On Monday, April 29 at 6 PM, New York advocacy groups and elected officials are sponsoring a Town hall meeting in Brooklyn Borough Hall on the need to protect student privacy and the inBloom project. This meeting will also be videotaped and livestreamed here. InBloom Inc. is a non-profit corporation, funded by the Gates and Carnegie Foundations, with the purpose of collecting the confidential student data of states throughout the country. inBloom is storing this information on a data cloud, and making it available to for-profit vendors to help them create and develop their learning products. Eight "pilot" states have signed on so far: New York, Massachusetts, Illinois, Colorado, North Carolina, and in phase II, due to begin soon, Delaware, Georgia, and Kentucky. Louisiana had originally agreed to share its data but the State Commissioner recently announced he was pulling out because of protests and the privacy concerns expressed by parents, students, and school board members. As of yet, only New York has announced that it is planning to share student data from the entire state; other states appear to be sharing the data from only selected "pilot" districts at this point, though information is scarce. According to inBloom, they expect more states and districts to join in soon. The confidential student data inBloom is planning to collect and share with vendors is personally-identifiable student information, including names, addresses, emails, photos, grades, test scores, detailed disciplinary, health and attendance records, race and ethnicity, and economic and disability status. They are also collecting the name, address, social security number, and work histories of teachers. Here is an excerpt of some of the sensitive data they are collecting. The operating system for inBloom Inc. is being built by Wireless Generation, a subsidiary of News Corporation. News Corporation is owned by Rupert Murdoch and has been found to illegally violate the privacy of individuals in Great Britain and in the United States. This personally-identifiable information is being stored on a data cloud managed by Amazon.com; in a recent survey, 86% of technology professionals said they did not trust clouds to hold their "more sensitive" data. inBloom Inc. has already statedthat it " cannot guarantee the security of the information stored ... or that the information will not be intercepted when it is being transmitted " to others. InBloom plans to make this information available to for-profit vendors to help them develop and market their "learning products." Starting in 2015, inBloom has stated it will likely charge all participating states and districts with a per student fee of about $2 to $5. Though in October, 2012, Stacey Childress, who is in charge of this project for the Gates Foundation, wrote: "Under federal law, school districts must manage and honor parent requests to opt out of programs that require the use of student data," so far not a single state or district has agreed to provide parents with the right to consent or opt out before sharing their children's data with inBloom. None have agreed to require consent or allow parents to opt out before they authorize inBloom to share this data with for-profit vendors. If a child's disability or health records were instead included in his medical files, sharing it with third parties without parental consent would be illegal according to the federal law known as HIPAA. Yet in recent years, the US Department of Education has rewritten the regulations pertaining to FERPA, the Family Educational Right to Privacy Act, to encourage the collection and sharing of personal student educational records by governmental agencies. There is currently a lawsuit in federal court against the Department for rewriting the regulations in a manner that violates the language and original intent of the law. InBloom has provided millions of dollars in grants to states and districts to participate in the data-sharing project, and is traveling around the country, holding "camps" and offering cash prizes to vendors to develop software programs that will utilize this confidential data. If you are interested in learning more, check out the Class Size Matters website and attend or tune into the Town hall meeting Monday night, April 29 at 6 PM, livestreamed here. |
