The big business of spying on little kids (2014)

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?”

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.

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.

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