From: Sean Andrews <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 19 Mar 2015 09:57:18 -0500

Perplexing indeed. For the record, it is possible to think both Google
and Pearson are evil. And it is also possible to make a distinction
between a free search and email provider I voluntarily use and a
testing monopoly that I (or my children or my students) am forced by
the state to comply with monitoring me in a separate space and using
their surveillance to get me in trouble with a public agency.
Admittedly, with Snowden's revelations, some of these distinctions are
getting murky - I volunteered to use gmail/google search/etc. and
Facebook, but I didn't assume the NSA (or private contractors like
Booze Allen) would so easily gain access to my private data. Perhaps I
should I have, but I didn't. On that front, there are plenty of
organizations also pushing for stronger legislation on data privacy. I
support their efforts too.

Moral norms are not something we just write down and all agree with.
They emerge from struggle, often against entrenched institutional
power of one kind or another. This anxiety over Pearson is not in
contrast to the anxiety over Google or Facebook or even Twitter -
which just auctioned off a bunch of its "data" to some miners; it is
of a piece with these anxieties and dismissing them with the fact that
we are all "complicit" with their platforms is hardly acceptable. In
the 17th century, Hobbes said we were all complicit and consenting
citizens simply because we didn't leave the land of the Leviathan.* If
that's your idea of democracy, there are some folks in Silicon Valley
that would like to hire you to do some PR work at the next ALA.

http://www.thebaffler.com/blog/mouthbreathing-machiavellis/

Though, it's worth noting these students aren't able to give consent
to Pearson and their parents have only the ability to give their voice
through exit - e.g. through the opt out movement - a la Hobbes which,
as Hirschman pointed out several decades ago, is a terrible way to
actually improve institutions, but is precisely the model advocated by
your Chicago school colleagues. Should we simply give up on the idea
of a public sphere? A private sphere? Any public regulation of the
private market? A state and market governed by norms we agree to
rather than formulated through boilerplate click through licenses and
free market assumptions of all agents having equal power in that
contract? Since you are on this forum - which is basically constituted
as a space to help equal out the power of the contracting parties in
the increasingly skewed U.S. library market - I seriously doubt you'd
agree with that, so why is it so different when we are private
citizens online?



On Wed, Mar 18, 2015 at 5:43 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> From: Michael Magoulias <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Wed, 18 Mar 2015 02:57:51 +0000
>
> This thread continues to perplex, but it's a useful indication of how
> contradictory the collective thinking is when it comes to assessing
> activities on the web. Anyone who is seriously concerned about the
> public at large being subject to digital surveillance should focus
> their attentions on the organizations that are the real offenders,
> namely Google and FaceBook. (And they certainly shouldn't be using
> Gmail.) What Google and FB do is infinitely more pernicious than this
> trivial incident regarding Pearson.
>
> There seems to be a drive to consign the same activity to "good" or
> "bad" buckets depending on how we feel about the actors. If you feel
> Pearson is evil, then their near-monopoly over standardized testing
> and monitoring of users will also be evil. If you think Google is
> good, or perhaps simply not evil, then their even greater
> near-monopoly over search and their far more successful track-record
> of invisibly stalking their users and monetizing the results will get
> a free pass.
>
> To me, this just shows that this is all still too new for us to be
> able to form coherent moral norms governing how people should be
> treated once it is possible to reduce them to a set of highly
> "actionable" data points, especially when they are seemingly so
> complicit in this reduction.
>
>
>
> > On Mar 17, 2015, at 7:59 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> >
> > From: Sean Andrews <[log in to unmask]>
> > Date: Tue, 17 Mar 2015 08:51:04 -0500
> >
> >
> > While I see the point you're making, Michael, I think the larger issue
> > is the idea that Pearson - a foreign, private, for-profit entity with
> > little to no public oversight other than through the holy oracle of
> > the market - can police the public sphere, criminalize loosely defined
> > speech infractions, and deputize public officials to enforce their
> > judgments all in the ideological defense of an unpopular testing
> > regime they have won control over through backroom deals and moral
> > panic.
> >
> > Whether you would agree with the above as a statement of fact, it is
> > unquestionable that Pearson and its fellow standardized testing orgs
> > have a public image dilemma - so they would be wise to use their
> > considerable power responsibly. From the facts described below - there
> > was no pic on the tweet and it was sent after testing was over - it
> > sounds less like a necessary security precaution to take for securing
> > this faulty model of educational assessment and more like a chance to
> > demonstrate its power of surveillance and to reaffirm that students'
> > agency is limited by an institution that gives them no ability to give
> > input other than filling in little bubbles.
> >
> > Perhaps we can justify this as an experiential lesson in the realities
> > of bureaucracy and the police state; but most of these students also
> > have to go to the DMV to get a driver's license so I think we have
> > that covered through voluntary extracurricular activities.