John Hildebrand reports:
Angry parents worried about their children’s privacy are fighting New York State’s planned turnover of 2.3 million public school students’ names and records to a private, high-tech corporation that will store and manage the records within a computerized “cloud” service.
The release of data to inBloom Inc., a nonprofit based in Atlanta, will include information on about 400,000 students on Long Island and is set to occur this fall or winter, officials said.
Read more on Newsday (sub. req.). The state, of course, is minimizing/denying parental concerns:
State education officials, who have worked with inBloom since 2011 to establish the “cloud” project, said parents’ fears were unwarranted.
InBloom will never release student information without permission from local districts, state and corporate officials said, and the data cannot be sold. The service will provide a high degree of data security through sophisticated encryption, they said.
Notice that there is no provision for parents to opt-out – or better yet, opt-in – as it is up to others to determine whether data will be shared.
And those in the state who are relying on assurances of data security should spend a week or so reading my blogs, including databreaches.net, to see how many supposedly secure databases get hacked or compromised on a daily basis.