Creepy Twitter & Student Data Gathering. Here’s How it’s Done & What is Wanted.

Are you a Twitter user?  If so, you might want to check out the new data gathering Twitter wants to do with your account.  Watch this tutorial on what Twitter wants to gather on your Twitter use in How to disable Twitter’s new creepy data collection.

Here’s what you will see when signing onto your account:

If you care about what happens to your data, don’t click ‘Sounds good’.  Review your settings.

This is what is automatically checked by twitter and these are actions which you are allowing Twitter to perform if you do not uncheck them:

‘Personalization’ of ads, apps, devices sounds a bit like the ‘personalization’ of education occurring through current ed reform policies. What the ed reformers won’t admit is the ‘personalized’ education requires similar information as Twitter is wanting in its marketing plan.  Twitter promises it won’t divulge your personal information but savvy and educated individuals know that even if this is true, individuals can be identified with only four data points.  Those ‘select partnerships’ could be described in ed reform as the federal/state agencies and third party researchers who need student personal data to ‘personalize’ the common educational experience.

At least Twitter is letting you know what it wants and you have the option to opt out.  That’s more than you say about the data mining and collection occurring in public schools today.  Twitter is a ‘free’ service and must find a way to make money.  What better way than to sell your data to the marketers who can target their messages to you on Twitter?

Ed reform insists that education should follow free market techniques (such as the marketing techniques used by Twitter) but publicly funded organizations don’t operate as a private company.  Regardless how stringently the ed reformers insist public schools should operate as private business, schools are funded by taxpayers and should be accountable to the taxpayers, not NGOs and data mining companies.  Education is ‘free’ to the student but the fact is…public education is funded by the public, not private organizations.  The NGOs and ed reform industry need to make money ‘personalizing’ the common educational experience and use the talking points/mandates that the student needs their services.  The data is needed to satisfy the mandates of ESSA and other policies written by private organizations.  Translation: more data is accessed by the companies/agencies who need the data for the policies they instituted which allowed the data mining.

Where’s the button to disable the invasive ‘personalization’ and data mining on students in public education?

Let’s block ads! (Why?)