Carie Valentine posted this to Facebook yesterday and I thought this needed to go out quickly to find out if others can replicate this experience.
“Please read this! My head is spinning. Most of the online resources we use are not only mining data they are going much deeper. I just found out that Khan Academy has been accessing the camera on our lap top to data mine. We covered the camera in the middle of a lesson and the computer said, “service error”. We aren’t using that anymore and we covered the camera with a sticky note. This is why the entirety of education reform is so bad and far reaching. I have known Khan was aligned with Common Core but naively thought we could use it here and there for other things besides math and English.”
Here’s an article Carie linked to on Khan’s data collection policies, and a bunch of other education related companies who have centered their business models on data collection.
http://www.politico.com/story/2014/05/data-mining-your-children-106676_Page2.html
Consider the popular nonprofit tutorial service Khan Academy. It’s free. But users do pay a price: In effect, they trade their data for the tutoring.
“Data is the real asset,” founder Sal Khan told an academic conference last fall.
The site tracks the academic progress of students 13 and older as they work through online lessons in math, science and other subjects. It also logs their location when they sign in and monitors their Web browsing habits. And it reserves the right to seek out personal details about users from other sources, as well, potentially building rich profiles of their interests and connections.
After POLITICO inquired about Khan Academy’s privacy policy, which gave it the right to draw on students’ personal information to send them customized advertising, the policy was completely rewritten. The new text, posted online late last week, emphasizes Khan Academy’s commitment to protecting privacy and deletes the line about targeted advertising.
But the revised policy makes clear that Khan Academy still allows third parties, such as YouTube and Google, to place the tiny text files known as “cookies” on students’ computers to collect and store information about their Web usage. Khan Academy also states that it may share personal information with app developers and other external partners, with students’ consent.
A spokeswoman for the site said Khan Academy’s main goal in collecting data is to “help students learn effectively and efficiently.”
The article also quotes Microsoft chief technology officer Cameron Evans as saying, “Children’s personal information ‘is splintering across the Internet. Anonymity is going to be more valuable than gold in the near future.’”
Well said Cameron. Your company is leading the effort to extinguish that anonymity.
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Related articles
Are Common Core Standards Actually Data Tags? www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-greene/common-core-standards_b_5346907.html
Who Puts the Scary in Pearson? Meet Knewton. http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2014/03/who-puts-scary-in-pearson-meet-knewton.html
The New Intelligence (big article on Knewton’s implementation at Arizona State University) http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/01/25/arizona-st-and-knewtons-grand-experiment-adaptive-learning#sthash.JPJ0qMp6.dpbs
We keep our camera covered all the time, and Khan Academy still works.
Thanks Helen. If it’s covered all the time there is no programatic change. What I’m most interested in, is if people have the camera uncovered typically so the camera gets turned on, but mid-lesson cover it, will it create an error for the program and crash it? IE. can this be replicated?
I just tried it. We started off with the camera uncovered and then part way through the lesson we covered it. Nothing happened and I had no indication my camera was on.
Helen-It wasn’t that Khan didn’t work it was that covering the camera caused the program to flash “service error” in the middle of my son’s lesson. The program does work if the camera is covered but we didn’t realize it was being accessed when he signed on. The point is, if they have access they will use it. That creeped me out to know that they were connecting to our camera like that and that covering disrupted whatever they were doing. I agree with Oak. I would like to know if anyone else can replicate this experience who is already using Khan and has a camera on their screen that hasn’t been disabled.
Do you have to Login to Khan?
no–you don’t
My son was on Khan biology for 20 minutes. We covered the camera on his laptop, and he was able to continue without any error messages. I shared this theory with him, and he was very quick to say he’ll ALWAYS keep his camera covered!
Would one be concerned about audio being recorded as well?
Good question Cory. I know there are ways people can access the camera. In general, people have to give permission in some way for this, but accidentally installing malware can do it too. Check these articles out. The first talks about malware and your camera. The second about how Facebook Messenger wants to access your microphone and be able to review your call logs and some other things that may concern you.
http://www.abc15.com/news/data-doctor/data-doctors-6-ways-to-stop-hackers-from-accessing-your-webcam
http://www.onthemedia.org/story/why-facebook-wants-access-your-phones-microphone-all-times/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines
That’s funny. Thanks for inspiring my next headline, or maybe more… :)
A web browser can’t send your location, access disk drives, or use the camera without your permission. My children regularly use Khan Academy and it has never asked for permission. Therefore, one can conclude Khan Academy doesn’t use the camera.