Henry Kronk writes:
Earlier in November, about 100 students at the Secondary School for Journalism in Brooklyn walked out of school. They were protesting the school’s adoption of Summit Learning and the Summit Platform. Having grown frustrated with long hours of screen time every day and a system that didn’t suite them well, put their student data at risk, and which could be easily cheated, they left school to register dissent. More recently, two organizers of the event wrote a letter to Mark Zuckerberg. The platform has been funded by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and was initially developed by Facebook engineers. In the letter, Akila Robinson and Kelly Hernandez write:
“Another issue that raises flags to us is all our personal information the Summit program collects without our knowledge or consent. We were never informed about this by Summit or anyone at our school, but recently learned that Summit is collecting our names, student ID numbers, email addresses, our attendance, disability, suspension and expulsion records, our race, gender, ethnicity and socio-economic status, our date of birth, teacher observations of our behavior, our grade promotion or retention status, our test scores and grades, our college admissions, our homework, and our extracurricular activities. Summit also says on its website that they plan to track us after graduation through college and beyond. Summit collects too much of our personal information, and discloses this to 19 other corporations.
“What gives you this right, and why weren’t we asked about this before you and Summit invaded our privacy in this way?”
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