The Big Biz of Spying On Little Kids 111
theodp writes: "'The NSA,' writes POLITICO's Stephanie Simon in her eye-opening Data Mining Your Children, 'has nothing on the ed tech startup known as Knewton. The data analytics firm has peered into the brains of more than 4 million students across the country. By monitoring every mouse click, every keystroke, every split-second hesitation as children work through digital textbooks, Knewton is able to find out not just what individual kids know, but how they think. It can tell who has trouble focusing on science before lunch — and who will struggle with fractions next Thursday.' Simon adds, 'Even as Congress moves to rein in the National Security Agency, private-sector data mining has galloped forward — perhaps nowhere faster than in education. Both Republicans and Democrats have embraced the practice. And the Obama administration has encouraged it, even relaxing federal privacy law to allow school districts to share student data more widely.'"
Re:Is this a big deal? Don't we want it? (Score:4, Interesting)
The bigger bonus to this is that it teaches children that constant surveillance is OK and expected.
To be honest I think doing this to children is a lot better than doing it to adults. I mean, adults are doing nothing about it, but children will quickly learn that they are under surveillance at all times and will take extreme measures to counter it. I don't know of any child who isn't an expert on defeating their parents control techniques, whatever they are.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)