The pushback begins: my response to inBloom's attorney
The pushback and spin begins. See the WaPost oped today, On the question of student privacy by Steve Winnick, the attorney for InBloom, the Gates-funded corporation that is collecting, storing and sharing the confidential student data from nine states, including NY, MA, LA, CO, IL, NC, GA, DE, and KY. More states may get added on over time as Gates offers states & districts cash to participate. (See ourfact sheet here.)
In all, Winnick's oped is a highly unconvincing rebuttal to an earlier WaPost article by Valerie Strauss, about the way the Obama administration is being sued for having gutted student privacy protections under FERPA, to encourage highly risky data-sharing projects like inBloom. Winnick that does not deny that inBloom will disclose sensitive and personally identifiable student information to for-profit vendors without parental consent. Indeed, this is what inBloom is designed to achieve.
Though Winnick goes into great length about whether this plan violates the pre- 2008 or pre- 2011 revisions of FERPA, this is immaterial to most parents; it clearly violates all sense of decency and ethical boundaries to provide such confidential and personally identifiable data, including student names, addresses, photographs,
Update: Our privacy bill with more sponsors & inBloom videos
Our student privacy bill, A06059, now has 35 sponsors in the NYS Assembly, including the original sponsor, AM O'Donnell, and a companion bill, S04284, in the State Senate. Check the links to see if your legislators have signed on, and if not, please call your Assemblymember and your State Senator today.
Two more recent media clips:
Who is Stockpiling and Sharing Private Information About New York Students (Village Voice) in which the NY State Education spokesperson claims that parents “give up” the right to decide if they want highly confidential information about their child shared with corporations and for-profit vendors when they register him or her in a public school.
Privacy, big data and education: more about the inBloom databases (Hechinger) in which InBloom Inc. attempts to disclaim all responsibility, and argues no one should blame them if parents aren’t notified or asked for consent before they share their child’s private information with vendors, as they’re just following orders. (For some of the highly sensitive data elements that inBloom is offering cash rewards to for-profit companies to develop their products around, see our blog here.)
For inBloom's vision of the future, see the spooky video below, in which kids silently sit in huge