One would hope to think that school is the safest place for children.
Unfortunately, we have been proven wrong of that idea more and more over the
years. Besides terrorists coming into school buildings with firearms, there is
now another reason that we should be worried about the safety and privacy of
school children.
Teachers spend plenty of time with their students throughout the
school year. Not only are the teachers teaching, but they are also learning
about their pupils. Teachers know certain facts about every child in their
classroom: sex, age, address, exam results, if they have special needs,
behavior habits, and absenteeism. A new computer network, known as the “One
System” is a place that now houses around eight million children’s personal
information across different UK countries.
Information, like stated above, is gathered by teachers. This
information is then submitted to the One System up to six times a day. This
steady flow of information is said to provide a “golden thread of data”. The
scariest thing to me is that the firm hires photographers to take pictures of
the school children. These images are then offered for sale to parents before
they are uploaded to the database. Basically, the company is taking advantage
of the information that they gather. I wonder how it is legal for the company
to basically bribe parents.
The information that is gathered about these millions of children can
be shared with numerous agencies. The police, the NHS child protection units
and charities are all possible agencies that could gather the information
stored in these massive databases. All of these agencies can get their hands on
this confidential information without the parents ever consenting to it.
School management databases for local councils have been around for
several years. These councils are now able to upload their existing data to the
One Database. Already, in Swindon, England, it has been recorded that 48,000
pupils are stored on the One System database and have been shared with health
officials at NHS hospitals and teams that work with young offenders. While it
is obvious that it is possible to share this information to different agencies,
there are still some kinks. Privacy advocates claim that one of the main
problems with the One System is that it is inconsistent among schools because
it is not a centralized government system. Because the information is
compartmentalized, it is hard to share information effectively and quickly,
even though it can be done.
There are two things that have been said by Nick Pickles, privacy
advocate of Big Brother Watch, to consider when thinking about One System’s
large database of child information:
1. “Child protection can not be delegated
to an algorithm without local or individual knowledge of that child. Databases
and computers remove human judgment.”
2. Once this data is on a database it “may
be lost, stolen or misused.”
We can only hope that this “Big
Brother” system does not spread to America’s children. There are already so
many worries that parents have when sending their children to school. This is
something that we should not have to worry about. School should be a safe place
for children, and if anyone can be trusted it should be teachers—the ones who
watch over school children for the majority of the week.
Sources:
http://rt.com/news/children-at-risk-data-522/
As I have been reading more and more of the posts on this blog, I have become increasingly concerned with the privacy connected with big data collection. It seems that if you are going to collect personal data, you need to weigh the privacy risks associated with it. The fact that teachers are collecting data on their children in such an extent is frightening; there seems to be no good way to keep this database from being abused. As quoted by Mr. Pickles, the purpose of this database to protect children seems to have the opposite effect; databases and computers do remove human judgment, and I do not think that big data currently has a place in an arena such as this.
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