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Wednesday, November 2, 2016

Who is advertising student data and who OWNS children’s data? – Missouri Education Watchdog

Who is advertising student data and who OWNS children’s data? – Missouri Education Watchdog:

Who is advertising student data and who OWNS children’s data?

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We live in a world where millions of bits of data about a person are collected and shared invisibly and your data footprint is saying things about you, predicting things about you,  that you never dreamed of.  It’s no wonder that so many people are interested in student data. Data is,  after all, moneyand there is a lot of money to be made in student data. “The SLDS data is a goldmine.”  As NEPC reports, students are under a constant state of surveillance. Requests for student data (like this from AIR) reach beyond grades, can include a student’s education record, can contain personal information about their health, their disabilities /IEPs, their income status, race, gender, age, behavior and discipline issues, and soon their emotions and social skills.  Predictive analytics and algorithms can further be used on data once it is collected, to determine everything from ADHD, attentiveness, emotion, personality, likelihood to commit future crimes, insurance risk, hire-ability score, potential career or college paths…it’s endless.  Students have no way to see how their data are predicting or choosing for them, data analtyics is getting too personal.  There are no laws regulating algorithms, they can be wrong and algorithms can be biased.  So it matters who is accessing and analyzing student data.