InBloom: Seeded before its time

Yesterday, inBloom (non-profit education software company) announced its plans to wind down operations over the next few months due to objections by parents and legislators. Adults became concerned about putting in too much information into this database (400 fields), such as students' social security numbers, details about school withdrawals, and family relationships. This month, New York passed legislation prohibiting their department of education from providing data to aggregators (like InBloom).

In mid-November of last year, parents in New York petitioned for a restraining order against the state department of education preventing them from providing student data to inBloom. Parents cited that providing this information was a dramatic departure from the then current practice and seemed to be taking steps backwards in terms of privacy.

inBloom describes its mission and goals as:
"a set of shared technology services that includes a secure, multi-tenant data store and middleware for identity management and data integration . . .  designed to help School Districts and State Educational Agencies provide educators, parents, elementary and secondary school students with learning data from many sources and connect them to relevant instructional resources to support personalized learning through inBloom. The service also helps State Educational Agencies in evaluating federal- and state-supported education programs."

The goal was to provide  "districts and states as a utility for them to more easily synchronize and transfer data, including student personally identifiable information (PII), across the various learning applications they deploy to teachers, students, and families."

So now it ends. inBloom is Out. 

But let's think about this for a few moments...

Is the population of the United States seriously considering the privacy rights of its vulnerable citizens? What?? This turns my privacy meter on its head. Since when did we care what information we share as long as no one gets hurt. What harm can come from this type of data aggregation? It's not like inBloom was going to turn over its education records to the department of child services to show that certain students had certain educational challenges - or home challenges that interfered with education. Data would not be misused or misinterpreted, right? Or shared with watchdog groups or even governmental agents who would put a spin on the data that might adversely affect students, families, school districts, or state funding, right?

Good googli moo