NY will share your child's private info with private companies w/o your permission. [View all]

New York is going "to share confidential NYC student and teacher data" with the Shared Learning Collaborative, funded by the Gates Foundation.

I don't understand how they can do this without notifying the parents. We had to let parents know about anything we did concerning their children.

From Parents Across America:

Parents beware NY and eight other states plan to share your child’s confidential school records
with a group funded by Gates Foundation.

The data to be shared will include the names of students, their grades, test scores, disciplinary and attendance records, and likely race, ethnicity, free lunch and special education status as well.

These records are to be stored in a massive electronic data bank, being built by Wireless Generation, a subsidiary of News Corporation. News Corporation is owned by Rupert Murdoch and has been found to illegally violate the privacy of individuals in Great Britain and in the United States.

Yes, Wireless Generation is part of Murdoch's empire.

Over the next few months, the Gates Foundation plans to turn over all this personal data to another, as yet unnamed corporation, headed by Iwan Streichenberger, the former marketing director of a company called Promethean that sells whiteboards, based in Atlanta GA.

Many are concerned this violates student privacy. There is a Federal law protecting student privacy, called FERPA (the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act), which allows states or districts to disclose students' personally identifiable education records without parental consent only in very limited circumstances and under stringent conditions, none of which apply in this case.

Moreover, we have learned that this confidential information is to be put on a cloud managed by Amazon.com, with few if any protections against data leakage.