
The big business of spying on little kids (2014) - walterbell
http://www.politico.com/story/2014/05/data-mining-your-children-106676
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credo
The arrogance of this CEO (demonstrated by the paragraph below) is mind-
boggling. Whether I trust the NSA or not is irrelevant to the question of
whether I want private companies tracking my children.

That said, this sort of tracking is happening in my son's school as well and
I'm trying to figure out how I should respond to this. Many schools (here in
the Seattle area) ask kids to do their homework online. My son (in elementary
school, public school) does math homework on the IXL website. They track all
of his online time, the specific timeframe he worked on his homework, time
spent on questions etc. This information is also made available to his
teacher. I plan to discuss related privacy issues with his teacher

>> _Knewton CEO Jose Ferreira finds such concerns overblown. When parents
protest that they don’t want their children data-mined, Ferreira wishes he
could ask them why: Is it simply that they don’t want a for-profit company to
map their kids’ minds? If not, why not? “They’d rather the NSA have it?” he
asked. “What, you trust the government?”_

~~~
atmosx
I am extremely sensitive in privacy issues, but between the NSA that could
_abuse_ some part of the data and a private corp. who will try to EXPLOIT the
data in EVERY POSSIBLE WAY, I'd go with the NSA any day of the week.

From the answer, we can rest assured that this guy WILL exploit the data he
gets in every possible way, no matter the consequences.

~~~
FilterSweep
I fear the fact that you have to choose between the lesser of two evils to
begin with is the real issue at hand. But I agree.

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zappo2938
A couple years ago I saw a lecture by Luis von Ahn of Doulingo. He started the
project not interested in education rather crowd sourcing but after a year he
had 23 employees working on the education part and 2 working on the crowd
sourcing of translations.

He hired a couple esteemed leaders in acadamia on the subject of foreign
language learning from prestigious universities as consultants. The question
they asked the consultants was which part of speech should be taught to
students learning a foreign language first? Do students learn faster if they
learn verbs first or if they learn nouns? And, nobody could answer that so he
got rid of the consultants and he and his engineers started to A/B different
students using all the data they were gleaning. He says they answered those
questions in a matter of weeks.

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reacweb
What is the answer ? Nouns first or verb first ?

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zappo2938
He said that information is proprietary.

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tilsammans
I have experience in this vertical. There is so much to tell about it. We
market a product directly to K-12 schools and never, not once, has a school
even asked us, let alone demanded, that student data is handled properly.
There is a severe knowledge gap between educators and technologists.

Educators see marketing materials about electronic courseware and quickly see
the benefits. Which are huge. There is not only adaptive learning, there is
learning on the student's own time, the computer is infinitely patient and
offers text, video, interactive quizzes, built-in standardised grading, you
name it. It's hard to oversell the great fit between education and technology.

So what happens is that schools engage with this without asking if there are
any drawbacks. This is likely to cause problems in the future. Knewton CEO
Jose Ferreira is quoted saying “I’m not calling your child a bundle of data.
I’m just helping her learn.” And this is 100% true. I absolutely believe he is
sincere as are so many other technologists. The point is, what happens when
this data is bundled, sold, hacked into, leaked and used in not-appropriate
ways? We just don't know but it's almost certain that it won't all be benign.
So a little apprehension is in order.

There is stronger protection for children in the EU than in the US, but it
almost doesn't matter. Schools don't enforce rigorous data policies--they
don't even know they have to. There are laws in place, but the law is widely
ignored, no matter what jurisdiction. So right now, protection of children's
data is in the hands of the technology companies. If you have good intentions,
ask what data you really need. After evaluation, we now only require name +
email for our program and nothing else. We stopped asking for gender and
anything else that's not needed.

I think it would be helpful if a gliding scale were implemented. Does your
technology just use basic info like email? You have more freedom to operate.
Do you ask for gender or religion? You're subject to more scrutiny. Do you
store the big stuff like social/developmental problems? You have to be
HIPPAA/FERPA compliant, etc. Right now though, there are no market or
regulatory forces in place to make this happen, it's sort of a wild west.

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WalterBright
Is there a statistically significant improvement in academic achievement
across the schools from using this software?

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tilsammans
Our proposition is letting gifted children interact with professions and
courseware they wouldn't normally encounter until late in high school. For
example they can learn civil engineering, chemistry, law, but also philosophy,
on a level normally given to 16-year-olds or even students. The program
doesn't have the goal of raising academic achievement school-wide and we don't
track that data I'm afraid.

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EdiX

        “They’d rather the NSA have it?” he asked. “What, you trust the government?”
    

As if they wouldn't turn the data to the NSA at the drop of a hat.

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
I'm not sure why it's even presented as an either-or scenario. Surely the NSA
will have it both ways?

