From: <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, 13 Feb 2015 06:38:43 +0000

Chuck,

Seems that you're on the same page as the White House.

Tim Cook lectures Barack Obama. The Apple CEO will speak at a White
House cybersecurity summit in California, amid tension between tech
companies and the US government over privacy and surveillance issues.
Executives from Google, Facebook, and Microsoft are also attending.
(Source: Quartz 13 Feb 2015)

Rather as the exhaust of our industrial society pollutes our lives, so
it seems does the 'exhaust' of a digital society. I can imagine the
latter might be as challenging to fix as the former not least because
the business model of the latter is increasingly dependent on being
able to analyse and find value in digital exhaust aka Big Data.

Toby Green
Head of Publishing
OECD



On 13 Feb 2015, at 00:57, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

From: "Hamaker, Charles" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 12 Feb 2015 16:49:37 +0000

Do we really want a foreign company - or any company - to have
comprehensive records , individual information at a very detailed
level on our citizens from K-12 through college and beyond. Our
children and grandchildren? Ourselves?

Personally I'm appalled, horrified and frightened at the massive
potential datamining  and uses that can go on with corporate ownership
of everything from records of misbehavior as a grade school student to
college essays and test results.

Such data can easily be used for evil, for prediction, for making
employment decisions, for tracking undesirable behaviors, or
incompatible opinions or otherwise used to impact my life.

With corporate ownership, with a corporation trying to make money out
of its assets, and one of those assets being detailed records on our
citizens, our children, our future, on me, yes, I'm terrified.

Where are the agreements to destroy (if you can) personally
identifiable information after a specific period of time, or to
protect the kid who got D's or worse in early grades from future
discrimination. Or legally binding agreements not to release any
individual information without permission from the creator or the
subject?

They don't exist as far as I know.

The often described school to prison pipeline, is an example, where
school records and behavior might be used track, categorize and judge
an individual.

But, what if mundane but in some future defined  critical behavior or
written item iwere entered in my permanent record, owned by a
corporation and used for anything from marketing to intimidation, from
embarrassment to harassment.

My perfervid rhetoric as a highschool debater, could well in today's
systems be an essay submitted to a corporation's website and stored on
its servers and hauled out (and even OWNED by the corporation
depending on the click through terms)  if I were a candidate for a
political office or a sensitive job? Or used to point fingers in a
legal action?

Such items could well be the POSESSION of a corporation in today's
"education" world. And I might never know it's in their system until a
forgotten essay or nugget of information is hauled out and placed in a
different context.

Do we really want every detail of our children's and student's lives
stored and mined by a corporation. Yes, so they are doing it with our
web posturing. But isn't this a different level, a bridge too far?

Chuck Hamaker