In light of the recent National Security Agency scan-dal, young Americans have every right to be concerned about personal items in school databases.

Valerie Strauss reports on an exchange about concerns over a controversial $100 million student database in The Washington Post:

Here is an exchange of letters about the controversial $100 million student database largely funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and operated by a new nonprofit organization, inBloom Inc. Privacy concerns about the database — which contains detailed information about millions of students — have been growing, and some states that initially signed up to participate in a pilot project have backed off.

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten recently released this statement, saying in part:

 Any potential inBloom has to improve and personalize learning is being overshadowed by a growing lack of public trust in its early communications and operations, and genuine concerns about the security, privacy, sharing and exploitation of data.

The AFT asked inBloom funders for “clarification” of issues, and following are the exchange of letters between Weingarten and funders, the Carnegie Corp. of New York and the Gates Foundation.

May 30, 2013
[To: Michele Cahill (Vice President for National Program and Director of Urban Education, Carnegie Corporation of New York), Stacey Childress (Deputy Director, Next Generation Models, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation]

Dear Michele, Dear Stacey:

….While I hope the positive potential to improve and personalize learning through inBloom services remains, it is being overshadowed by a growing lack of public trust in its early communications and operations, and by genuine concerns about the security, privacy, sharing and exploitation of data.

The concern we have heard most is about the attachment of students’ names, addresses, Social Security numbers or other identifying information to data, as opposed to attaching only characteristics that are not uniquely identifiable. Also of great concern is the security of such large and sensitive sets of cloud-stored data. What’s more, there is a lack of clarity around the purposes and nature of sharing data across district and state boundaries, as the inBloom platform allows, and whether private vendors can benefit financially. Add to all this the changes to the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) that have liberalized third-party data access, and it is little wonder that educators and parents are concerned about the implications of data storage and sharing and want a say in how their and their children’s data are used and by whom…..

The following response, in light of recent news, contains the following statement that cannot be comforting:

Issues of data privacy and security for both teachers and students are of the utmost importance to inBloom, and that is why, since the early design phase, it has continually sought advice from some of the leading experts in the field to ensure that it would exceed existing requirements and deliver a more secure service to states and districts than the systems they currently have in place.