The profits are the point
Peter Greene takes a moment to examine the persistence of the student surveillance industry.
The point of using all those devices – school-issued or otherwise – to monitor student behavior/activity is allegedly to protect the students.
However, as Greene notes, there’s often more involved – like amassing mountains of data that can be used for marketing and profit.
But the fact that we were all kind of distracted did not stop the march of ed tech’s surveillance industry. How could they? It was like printing money, and it dovetailed perfectly with the longstanding interest in data mining children to get that womb-to-tomb pipeline up and running. No matter how creepy it seemed, it was a profitable way to fix it so that busy CEOs could log on and select meat widgets like picking out toasters on Amazon.
Data is the new gold, and what we get are a whole bunch of companies saying, “I would like to collect a bunch of your gold, but don’t worry, I’ll keep it safely stored in this unlocked desk drawer.” Then before you know it, you’re reading about how huge investment firm Blackstone has bought Ancestry.com and its vast stores of genetic information. Probably just because they have a keen interest in genealogy.
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