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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2015/03/14/pearson-monitoring-social-media-for-security-breaches-during-parcc-testing/

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So Pearson is monitoring Twitter, and that's an invasion of privacy? Because there is an expectation of privacy for tweets? The things I learn.[/quote]

PP who posted the Valerie Strauss article -- thanks, that brings a lot more clarity!

And I agree with the other PP quoted above; Pearson can monitor Twitter all they like*. What's concerning to me here is that they were able to connect a HS student's Twitter account with the student's school and testing supervisor. Pearson can monitor Twitter, and Pearson is authorized by the NJDOE to collect student data for the purposes of administering the test. But I can't imagine that they are authorized to use student data act on their social media data. How did they know which school the student attended?

I mean, I think it's *creepy* that they are monitoring kids' accounts, but I don't think it's *illegal* -- and if the kid is under 13, then the fault lies with Twitter not with Pearson, actually. [/quote]

BINGO. That's the creep factor here - that they matched up the kid's tweet with all the other data they'd collected from the schools, and used it to put a disciplinary process into motion. Yuck, yuck, yuck. No matter how you feel about testing/common core/etc, I hope we can all agree that private companies should not be gathering our children's data like this. The contracts should have strict limits on what data they can collect and how they can use it, and when it has to be destroyed. [/quote]

I doubt that they had to look at any of their data to make a connection.  My guess is the same Twitter account that had the information about the test question had other tweets that clearly identified the kid's school and grade, and that there were no controls to keep the public from viewing it.[/quote]

It's a lot more than that. Pearson probably has a program to scrape and analze twitter, search for mentions of PARCC, find the students' school from a key word search, then match this up to their contacts database to find the school administrator.  They are not innocently stumbling across things - they are deliberately using data analytic techniques to find information that may not have been present in just the Twitter feed.  [/quote]

Yes, they are deliberately looking for information about their product on Twitter.  No doubt about that.  But almost every other for profit corporation does the same.  It's hardly some new sinister thing that Pearson has come up with.  And yes it's possible that they used their contacts database to find out the name of the school principal, but since that information is publicly available on every school's website, I can hardly have a fit about that.

I would be very surprised that a kid who doesn't have the sense to refrain from posting about test questions, would be keeping their school private online.  In my experience, kids post things like "Go Whitman Vikings" all the time on all sorts of social media.[/quote]

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