Monday, October 07, 2013

Has anyone been paying attention?
Natasha Singer reports on concerns about InBloom and student privacy. Here’s a snippet:
She did not imagine that five months later, she would be sitting in a special school board meeting in the district’s headquarters, listening as a series of parents, school board members and privacy lawyers assailed the plan to outsource student data storage to inBloom. What troubled the naysayers [not the most even handed language Bob] at that August session was that the district seemed to be rushing to increase data-sharing before weighing the risks of granting companies access to intimate details about children. They noted that administrators had no policies in place to govern who could see the information, how long it would be kept or whether it would be shared with the colleges to which students applied.
“Students are currently subject to more forms of tracking and monitoring than ever before,” Khaliah Barnes, a lawyer at the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington who appeared via video conferencing, told the room packed with parents. “While we understand the value of data for promoting and evaluating personalized learning, there are too few safeguards for the amount of data collected and transmitted from schools to private companies.”
Read the full story on New York Times.


Interesting. Would we find the Chinese military grabbing a dissident from the US as amusing?
Capture of bombing suspect in Libya represents rare ‘rendition’ by U.S. military
The capture of an alleged al-Qaeda operative outside his home by Special Operations forces in Tripoli on Saturday and his secret removal from Libya was a rare instance of U.S. military involvement in “rendition,” the practice of grabbing terrorism suspects to face trial without an extradition proceeding and long the province of the CIA or the FBI.


Another TSA failure? (Of course they describe him as “smart.” Safer than describing their security as “dumb.)
'Street Smart' Boy Hops on Flight to Las Vegas Alone
A "very street smart" nine-year-old boy managed to pass through a security checkpoint at a Minnesota airport and hop on a flight to Las Vegas without a boarding pass, authorities said.
The boy arrived alone at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport on Thursday morning, airport spokesman Patrick Hogan told ABC News.
He was screened by TSA officials and then headed to an airport concourse, where he boarded an 11:15 a.m. flight on Delta to Sin City.

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