The education nonprofit inBloom collects and mines student data under the guise of revolutionizing personalized learning, but its critics question whether governments should have control of over 400 data points per student.
I am curious as to why I feel this is different than what Google/Facebook et. al do with data. I suspect the answer has to do with the fact that public education is not an 'opt-in' situation for parents and students. While Google and Facebook make us a value proposition in exchange for our data, I'm not sure what my child's teachers (or my child for that matter) are getting value back from the private interests who are reselling and researching from that data.
InBloom would certainly argue that the school district administration is getting value from the data exchange, but I'm not convinved that my child or her teacher is nessessarily getting any "trickle down" from that value. (And besides, it's not like trickle down works for anything other than rehtoric and pee.)
So the question: To whom does data collected in public trust belong?
I'm starting to feel a post-privacy world needs some sort of doctrine of public trust regards to data and data mining -- a sort of hippocratic oath for data collectors and advertising companies. The "Don't be Evil" mission of public enterprise seems to be whats missing here.
