Why do you believe inBloom was misusing confidential data?
inBloom had a catch-22: they wanted education app creators to build new tools and services on their platform. Vendors wanted to know that they had some potential customers, so inBloom courted states and districts to provide data (just like any other educational app provider - see below) on the hope of these cheaper and possibly better applications.
inBloom was trying to solve a problem that technologists in education are keenly aware of; integration of new apps into the educational ecosystem is time consuming and expensive. State and local school systems utilize many point solutions. Each and every one of these solutions needs pieces of student personal data to operate. E.g. transportation, grade books, learning management systems, directory/identity management, email, exceptional children, reduced and free lunch, lunch money services, field trip management, etc.
Each of those systems are getting dumps from student information systems so they can perform their stated functions. Each of these systems require custom integration efforts - time and money.
As a parent, in how many systems and in how many data centers do you want your child's information? The inBloom model would (in an ideal world) limit this number. Currently, one can easily guarantee a child's information is spread across at least 10 vendors with some of those systems still being hosted by the school, district, or state, but the model is shifting to cloud hosting. (I can name six data centers across the US where my kids data currently reside. If your state doesn't have statutes to keep it in state or country, then it could be across the world. A single vendor will spread the data across data centers for disaster recovery per the educational agencies requirements.)
inBloom set out to provide a secure data service to provide this information to apps that states and local schools wish to use. Basically, a back-end for an educational app store, if you will. While i don't believe they had the perfect model, it had many improvements over what exists today.
A child's personal information is covered by more laws than adults, so the various allegations of mining and sharing is, well, silly. It's the same laws that are in place for all those vendors that are receiving copies of your child's data today.
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Re: Privacy vs Sharing
Why do you believe inBloom was misusing confidential data?
inBloom had a catch-22: they wanted education app creators to build new tools and services on their platform. Vendors wanted to know that they had some potential customers, so inBloom courted states and districts to provide data (just like any other educational app provider - see below) on the hope of these cheaper and possibly better applications.
inBloom was trying to solve a problem that technologists in education are keenly aware of; integration of new apps into the educational ecosystem is time consuming and expensive. State and local school systems utilize many point solutions. Each and every one of these solutions needs pieces of student personal data to operate. E.g. transportation, grade books, learning management systems, directory/identity management, email, exceptional children, reduced and free lunch, lunch money services, field trip management, etc.
Each of those systems are getting dumps from student information systems so they can perform their stated functions. Each of these systems require custom integration efforts - time and money.
As a parent, in how many systems and in how many data centers do you want your child's information? The inBloom model would (in an ideal world) limit this number. Currently, one can easily guarantee a child's information is spread across at least 10 vendors with some of those systems still being hosted by the school, district, or state, but the model is shifting to cloud hosting. (I can name six data centers across the US where my kids data currently reside. If your state doesn't have statutes to keep it in state or country, then it could be across the world. A single vendor will spread the data across data centers for disaster recovery per the educational agencies requirements.)
inBloom set out to provide a secure data service to provide this information to apps that states and local schools wish to use. Basically, a back-end for an educational app store, if you will. While i don't believe they had the perfect model, it had many improvements over what exists today.
A child's personal information is covered by more laws than adults, so the various allegations of mining and sharing is, well, silly. It's the same laws that are in place for all those vendors that are receiving copies of your child's data today.