Tag: privacy

Together, we must send a universal humanistic response to those who claim a right to users’ private information about what should not and will not be tolerated.

If a business is built on misleading users on data exploitation, on choices that are no choices at all, then it does not deserve our praise. It deserves reform.

At a moment of rampant disinformation and conspiracy theories juiced by algorithms, we can no longer turn a blind eye to a theory of technology that says all engagement is good engagement — the longer the better — and all with the goal of collecting as much data as possible. It is long past time to stop pretending that this approach doesn’t come with a cost — of polarization, of lost trust and, yes, of violence.

Too many are still asking the question “how much can we get away with” when they need to be asking “what are the consequences”.

A social dilemma cannot be allowed to become a social catastrophe.

Source: Tim Cook on Privacy – YouTube

These are necessary words that Facebook deserves.

Security is the foundation of privacy. Privacy is a fundamental human right.

Apple’s privacy stance, the gist:

  • Security is the foundation of privacy.
  • Privacy is a fundamental human right.
  • Embody commitments to privacy with code.

That’s my takeaway from Craig Federighi’s keynote at the 10th Annual European Data Protection & Privacy Conference.

… the four key privacy principles that guide Apple.

  1. Not collecting unnecessary data through data minimization.
  2. Processing as much data on device as possible.
  3. Making it clear to customers what data is collected and giving them tools to control how that data is used.
  4. Keeping data safe through security, including Apple’s unique integration of hardware and software. Security is the foundation of privacy.

Source: Craig Federighi Shares Apple’s Four Privacy Principles in Conference Keynote – MacRumors

Now, others take the opposite approach. They gather, sell, and hoard as much of your personal information as they can. The result is a data-industrial complex, where shadowy actors work to infiltrate the most intimate parts of your life and exploit whatever they can find–whether to sell you something, to radicalize your views, or worse. — Craig Federighi

I agree with all of that. Props to Apple for pushing privacy and pissing off the right people.

We must work not only toward providing better security around student data but also toward _educating _students about the need to critically evaluate how their data is used and how to participate in shaping data privacy practices and policies. These policies and practices will affect them for the rest of their lives, as individuals with personal data and also as leaders with power over the personal data of others. Regulation is necessary, but education is the foundation that enables society to recognize when its members’ changing needs require a corresponding evolution in its regulations. And for those of us in academia, unlike those in industry, education is our work.

Source: Education before Regulation: Empowering Students to Question Their Data Privacy | EDUCAUSE

Via: 📑 Education before Regulation: Empowering Students to Question Their Data Privacy | Read Write Collect

During our research, we also found ourselves reflecting on the unique position of the school as an institution tasked not only with educating its students but also with managing their personal data. Couldn’t one then argue that, since the school is a microcosm of the wider society, the school’s own data protection regime could be explained to children as a deliberate pedagogical strategy? Rather than something quietly managed by the GDPR compliance officer and conveyed as a matter of administrative necessity to parents, the school’s approach to data protection could be explained to students so they could learn about the management of data that is important to them (their grades, attendance, special needs, mental health, biometrics).

Source: What’s the Role of the School in Educating Children in a Datafied Society? – Connected Learning Alliance

Via: 📑 What’s the Role of the School in Educating Children in a Datafied Society? | Read Write Collect

I think there’s a lot to say about machine learning and the push for “personalization” in education. And the historian in me cannot help but add that folks have trying to “personalize” education using machines for about a century now. The folks building these machines have, for a very long time, believed that collecting the student data generated while using the machines will help them improve their “programmed instruction” – this decades before Mark Zuckerberg was born.

I think we can talk about the labor issues – how this continues to shift expertise and decision making in the classroom, for starters, but also how students’ data and students’ work is being utilized for commercial purposes. I think we can talk about privacy and security issues – how sloppily we know that these companies, and unfortunately our schools as well, handle student and teacher information.

Source: Machine Teaching, Machine Learning, and the History of the Future of Public Education

I told her that I don’t believe in hope and I don’t believe in hopelessness; I believe in compassion and pragmatism. Hope can be lethal when you are fighting an autocracy. Hope is inextricable from time, and as anyone who has studied the entrenchment of dictators knows, the longer they stay in, the harder it is to get them out. Every day passed is damage done.

We were never going to be okay because America had never been okay. In January, 2017, America emerged from an election that not only brought an unworthy leader, but exploited every pre-existing crisis in U.S. history: racism, income inequality, geographic inequality, misogyny, xenophobia, battles over surveillance and privacy, and so on.

Source: The resistance to Donald Trump is not what you think – The Globe and Mail

When people location trackers are marketed as ‘smart badges’ by trusted brands (like ISTE), when their operations are not explained, and when the technology is obfuscated, people become de-sensitized to practices they may otherwise object to.

Did the people in these pictures know they were socializing and learning in an environment where each of their movements were tracked within a meter of accuracy? Did they understand how these data will be used, how it is secured, and with whom it will be shared? Do they each think the cost-benefit of sharing these location data are worth the yet-to-be-sent conference summary emails? Did the surveillance system actually allow ISTE to make adjustments in real-time to popular sessions that were turning away participants?

Yet, despite the email and the physical signs at the registration desk, many people asserted to me that they never received notice of the use of the ‘smart badge’. Of those that did, many had no idea how it worked. They thought it was just a QR code for vendors to scan. Many didn’t understand that it was a battery-powered transmitter without an off-switch. Not a one was happy upon learning what I discovered.

Did ISTE offer enough information to participants so they could make an informed judgment about the value of wearing the badge vs. the potential risks? Should wearing the badges have been an opt-in vs. opt-out decision for participants? For educators trying to manage the privacy and security risks of edtech in their own classrooms, what lesson does this incident impart about best practices and informed consent?

As ISTE and its members collectively mull through these questions, I look forward to hearing about the reactions to the after-conference reports that participants are slated to receive about their movements and presumed interests. Will folks feel like it added value? I bet for some segment of participants receiving that email will trigger concerns they didn’t even know enough to worry about in the first place. It will be the first time they realized their movements have been tracked.

Source: Hacking the ISTE18 Smart Badge, Part II – K-12 Cybersecurity Resource Center

My greatest objection to being tagged like livestock was that it would only be a short matter of time before some bonehead referred to the fantabulous “Smart Badges” as educational technology. When I mentioned this to my friend Chris Lehmann, he told me that it already had.

Q: Why is ISTE using smart badges?
A: ISTE recognizes the value of personalized learning and wants to do all we can to create custom and individualized educational experiences for each of our attendees. Smart badges will allow us to provide you with your own “ISTE 2018 Journey” post conference. The journey will detail the sessions you attended and the resources you collected. It’s like taking notes with your feet! Additionally, this data will allow the ISTE team to further personalize the conference experience now and in the future. This aggregate data, combined with registration information, will provide more comprehensive insights into attendee patterns and activities.

Therein lies the problem. Tracking students legs, bums, or corneas is not education. It is not personalization, a fantasy that after decades has produced little more than dispensing a multiple-choice question based on how well you answered another multiple-choice question. Personalized learning is at best machine-based testing. It has little to do with teaching beyond automation and nothing to do with learning. Yet, ISTE’s largest corporate sponsors profit greatly by this hideous handful of magic beans.

The greatest threat of the ISTE “Smart Badges” is the denaturing of educational computing’s powerful potential and the organization’s misanthropic service of corporate sponsors, often in ways detrimental to its members – the ones who justify its tax-exempt status.

Source: ISTE’s Dopey Dystopia : Stager-to-Go

I updated “Mindset Marketing, Behaviorism, and Deficit Ideology” with selections from “How (and Why) Ed-Tech Companies Are Tracking Students’ Feelings – Education Week” and “Are Students Benefiting From the Growth Mindset Model?”.

Overall, weak effects across both analyses indicate that mindset alone fails to facilitate significant shifts in student academic performance and in-school success. While mindsets, also referred to as implicit theories, may influence educational trajectories, there are likely other factors that are better at predicting student success, such as school and classroom characteristics.

Mindset interventions have gained traction in recent years because they’re intuitive and marketable. The idea that confidence facilitates success is accessible and, as a result, it is incorporated into many programs designed to support students. Unfortunately, programs advertised to promote a growth mindset in students are often poorly developed, ineffective, or lack empirical support.

The notion that a growth mindset is enough to inspire success in students is also problematic, in that it disregards powerful circumstantial features of students’ in-school experiences, such as nutrition, poverty, instructional quality, psychosocial stress, external pressures, abuse, etc. Although future research may serve to disentangle the components of certain growth mindset programs that are effective and help to eliminate pieces that are not, perhaps the abundant resources devoted to growth mindset program development and research would be more appropriately applied to other efforts to improve in-school instructional quality and social-emotional supports.

Source: Are Students Benefiting From the Growth Mindset Model?

“If you generate detailed information about students’ feelings, then it becomes possible to target them in sophisticated ways in order to nudge them to behave in ways that conform with a particular, idealized model of a ‘good student,'” Williamson said.

Government agencies and Silicon Valley companies deciding how students should be thinking and what they should be feeling-then collecting massive amounts of data and deploying invisible algorithms to enact that agenda-is something to be fought now, before the horse is all the way out of the barn.

Source: How (and Why) Ed-Tech Companies Are Tracking Students’ Feelings – Education Week