Loss of Privacy

Jefferson County Public Schools is working with inBloom, to streamline its student data, raising privacy concerns about how safe student information is.

Some parents have serious concerns, that student grades, test scores, even health records will be vulnerable to cyber attack.

“I’m very concerned about our children’s privacy,” Stickland said. “In my eyes, it’s an invasion of our children’s privacy and parents aren’t involved in the conversation and they’re not allowed to consent.”

The school district says that the current system is a waste of time.

“With inBloom, what that does is it allows teachers to get access to data in a much more efficient way than they do now,” Mortimer said. “They have to log into so many different systems. Eight, 9, 10 systems or more sometimes on a daily basis just to get access to the data that they need.”

Also of concern is the fact that students, and their parents, have no option to opt out of sharing student information with third parties.

Another concern is that inBloom will share student data with third party companies, which may not have the same digital security technology.

Jeffco points out the pilot program is in full compliance with FERPA, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, although those laws were recently relaxed to allow collection and sharing of student data without parental consent.

Who could have seen this coming? (/sarcasm)

Have you seen the Capitol Hill drone pilot? You’ve read concerns about Seattle Police using drones for surveillance but a resident of the Miller Park area around 19th and Thomas tells CHS she is concerned about a fellow citizen employing a drone near her home:

This afternoon, a stranger set an aerial drone into flight over my yard and beside my house near Miller Playfield.  I initially mistook its noisy buzzing for a weed-whacker on this warm spring day.  After several minutes, I looked out my third-story window to see a drone hovering a few feet away.  My husband went to talk to the man on the sidewalk outside our home who was operating the drone with a remote control, to ask him to not fly his drone near our home.  The man insisted that it is legal for him to fly an aerial drone over our yard and adjacent to our windows.  He noted that the drone has a camera, which transmits images he viewed through a set of glasses.  He purported to be doing “research”.  We are extremely concerned, as he could very easily be a criminal who plans to break into our house or a peeping-tom.

The woman tells us she called police but they decided not to show up when the man left. She wonders if anybody else has encountered this Capitol Hill drone pilot.

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Source.

From Democracy Now:

The American Civil Liberties Union has obtained documents revealing that the FBI and IRS may be reading emails and other electronic communications of U.S. citizens without obtaining a warrant. This comes just as reports have emerged that the Obama administration is considering approving an overhaul of government surveillance of the Internet. The New York Times reported the new rules would make it easier to wiretap users of web services such as instant messaging. “The FBI wants to be able to intercept every kind of possible communication,” says attorney Ben Wizner, director of the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. “The FBI basically wants to require all of these companies to rewrite their code in order to enable more government surveillance. … And in order to accomplish that, they would make the whole Internet less secure.”

The Palm Beach County Sheriff’s department has received $1 million for a violence prevention unit that is getting attention from privacy advocates. Florida legislators awarded the money to Sheriff Ric Bradshaw to create the unit with the idea that they will be able to prevent gun tragedies from occurring. Bradshaw intends on utilizing specially trained deputies and mental health professionals in the prevention of crimes.

Read the rest of my article at The Daily Censored.