Zuckerberg unbound: the impact of his new LLC on student privacy and real personalized learning
Zuckerberg's open letter to his daughter
I'm quoted in Time magazine and Politico about what the Zuckerberg billions portends in terms ofstudent privacy and real personalized learning. And check out this wonderful spoofof edtech balderdash from the Institute for Disruptive Innovation and Mark Vander Venal of the Parsimony Institute.
Tuesday was a startling day for parents concerned about children’s data privacy and the outsourcing of instruction to education technology companies. First was the news that the V-tech breach had exposed the personal data of more than 6.3 million children – rather than the 200,000 that was first described.
Stolen data for the parents includes mailing and email addresses, security questions used for password resets, IP addresses, passwords and download histories…Chat logs between parents and children were also inappropriately accessed, as well as photos of children.
Then the Electronic Frontier Federation filed a FTC complaint against Google for violating thestudent privacy pledge the company signed the year before. The complaint alleges that Google is collecting and data-mining the information of students while logged into their Google Apps for Education accounts at school:
While Google does not use student data for targeted advertising within a subset of Google sites, EFF found that Google’s “Sync” feature for the Chrome browser is enabled by default on Chromebooks sold to schools. This allows Google to track, store on its servers, and data mine for non-advertising purposes, records of every Internet site students visit, every search term they use, the results they click on, videos they look for and watch on YouTube, and their saved passwords.
Google, it is alleged, is using children’s browsing history to improve their products, and not for any educational purposes, as the privacy pledge specifies. A day later EFF added:
Google has promised not to build profiles on students or serve them ads only within Google Apps for Education services. When a student goes to a different Google service, however, and they’re still logged in under their educational account, Google associates their activity on that service with their educational account, and then serves them ads on at least some of those non-GAFE services based on that activity.
Finally, came the most horrifying news of all: Mark Zuckerberg announced that with the birth of his daughter Max, he and his wife Priscilla NYC Public School Parents: Zuckerberg unbound: the impact of his new LLC on student privacy and real personalized learning:
