By Jennifer Pak February 13, 2018 | 1:04 PM https://www.marketplace.org/2018/02/13/world/qa-china-s-social-credit-system
Archive of ‘digital identity’ category
Depression and Anxiety Teenagers
Teenagers Say Depression and Anxiety Are Major Issues Among Their Peers
By Karen Zraick
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/20/health/teenage-depression-statistics.html
The survey found that 70 percent of teenagers saw mental health as a big issue. Fewer teenagers cited bullying, drug addiction or gangs as major problems; those from low-income households were more likely to do so.
Some psychologists have tied a growth in mental health issues among teenagers to increased social media use, academic pressure and frightening events like terror attacks and school shootings.
A study released in 2017 found that the number of children and adolescents admitted to children’s hospitals for thoughts of self-harm or suicide had more than doubled from 2008 to 2015, echoing trends in federal data.
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more about depression in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=depression
DuckDuckGo vs Google
Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway.
2019 may finally be the year for ‘The Search Engine That Doesn’t Track You’
Drew Millard, Jan 15, 2019
https://medium.com/s/story/nothing-can-stop-google-duckduckgo-is-trying-anyway-718eb7391423
cybercrime stats
Students Data Privacy
What Happens to Student Data Privacy When Chinese Firms Acquire U.S. Edtech Companies?
By Jenny Abamu Apr 24, 2018
Between the creation of a social rating system and street cameras with facial recognition capabilities, technology reports coming out of China have raised serious concerns for privacy advocates. These concerns are only heightened as Chinese investors turn their attention to the United States education technology space acquiring companies with millions of public school users.
A particularly notable deal this year centers on Edmodo, a cross between a social networking platform and a learning management system for schools that boasts having upwards of 90 million users. Net Dragon, a Chinese gaming company that is building a significant education division, bought Edmodo for a combination of cash and equity valued at $137.5 million earlier this month.
Edmodo began shifting to an advertising model last year, after years of struggling to generate revenue. This has left critics wondering why the Chinese firm chose to acquire Edmodo at such a price, some have gone as far as to call the move a data grab.
as data becomes a tool that governments such as Russia and China could use to influence voting systems or induce citizens into espionage, more legislators are turning their attention to the acquisitions of early-stage technology startups.
NetDragon officials, however, say they have no interest in these types of activities. Their main goal in acquiring United States edtech companies lies in building profitability, says Pep So, NetDragon’s Director of Corporate Development.
In 2015, the firm acquired the education technology platform, Promethean, a company that creates interactive displays for schools. NetDragon executives say that the Edmodo acquisition rounds out their education product portfolio—meaning the company will have tools for supporting multiple aspects of learning including; preparation, instructional delivery, homework, assignment grading, communication with parents students and teachers and a content marketplace.
NetDragon’s monetization plan for Edmodo focuses on building out content that gets sold via its platform. Similar to tools like TeachersPayTeachers, So hopes to see users putting up content on the platform’s marketplace, some free and others for a fee (including some virtual reality content), so that the community can buy, sell and review available educational tools.
As far as data privacy is concerned, So notes that NetDragon is still learning what it can and cannot do. He noted that the company will comply with Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), a federal regulation created in order to protect the privacy of children online, but says that the rules and regulations surrounding the law are confusing for all actors involved.
Historically, Chinese companies have faced trust and branding issues when moving into the United States market, and the reverse is also true for U.S. companies seeking to expand overseas. Companies have also struggled to learn the rules, regulations and operational procedures in place in other countries.
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Iran and Huawei top agenda as Pompeo meets Merkel for 45 minutes in Berlin
https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/pompeo-merkel-iran-huawei-agenda-110409835.html
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Merkel to Ratchet up Huawei Restrictions in Concession to Hawks
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more on data privacy in this IMS blog:
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=data+privacy
Social Credit System
Social Credit System
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System
China ‘social credit’: Beijing sets up huge system
26 October 2015 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-34592186
China’s “Social Credit System” Will Rate How Valuable You Are as a Human
What people can and can’t do will depend on how high their “citizen score” is.
Dom GaleonDecember 2nd 2017 https://futurism.com/china-social-credit-system-rate-human-value/
China has started ranking citizens with a creepy ‘social credit’ system — here’s what you can do wrong, and the embarrassing, demeaning ways they can punish you
Alexandra Ma Oct. 29, 2018, 12:06 PM https://www.businessinsider.com/china-social-credit-system-punishments-and-rewards-explained-2018-4/
How does China’s social credit system work?
China is taking digital control of its people to chilling lengths
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international digital inclusion week
Recording of International Digital Inclusion Week Webinar
AI tracks students writings
categories: digital citizenship, digital identity, Digital literacy, information technology, privacy
Schools are using AI to track what students write on their computers
By Simone Stolzoff August 19, 2018
50 million k-12 students in the US
Under the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA), any US school that receives federal funding is required to have an internet-safety policy. As school-issued tablets and Chromebook laptops become more commonplace, schools must install technological guardrails to keep their students safe. For some, this simply means blocking inappropriate websites. Others, however, have turned to software companies like Gaggle, Securly, and GoGuardian to surface potentially worrisome communications to school administrators
In an age of mass school-shootings and increased student suicides, SMPs Safety Management Platforms can play a vital role in preventing harm before it happens. Each of these companies has case studies where an intercepted message helped save lives.
Over 50% of teachers say their schools are one-to-one (the industry term for assigning every student a device of their own), according to a 2017 survey from Freckle Education
But even in an age of student suicides and school shootings, when do security precautions start to infringe on students’ freedoms?
When the Gaggle algorithm surfaces a word or phrase that may be of concern—like a mention of drugs or signs of cyberbullying—the “incident” gets sent to human reviewers before being passed on to the school. Using AI, the software is able to process thousands of student tweets, posts, and status updates to look for signs of harm.
SMPs help normalize surveillance from a young age. In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal at Facebook and other recent data breaches from companies like Equifax, we have the opportunity to teach kids the importance of protecting their online data
in an age of increased school violence, bullying, and depression, schools have an obligation to protect their students. But the protection of kids’ personal information is also a matter of their safety
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more on cybersecurity in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=cybersecurity
more on surveillance in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=surveillance
more on privacy in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=privacy
digital forensics and news literacy education
Digital Forensics and News Literacy Education
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more on fake news in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=fake+news
fake news disinformation propaganda
the secret of freedom
if we are in a post-truth moment then we need to understand the tools we have at hand to deal with falsehoods.
Tom Dickinson describes four different types of distributed ‘fake news’.
‘Fake news’ is lazy language. Be specific. Do you mean:
A) Propaganda
B) Disinformation
C) Conspiracy theory
D) Clickbait
The RAND Corporation, a US think-tank with strong ties to the military industrial complex, recently looked at the influence of the Russian Propaganda Model and how best to deal with it.
Three factors have been shown to increase the (limited) effectiveness of retractions and refutations: (1) warnings at the time of initial exposure to misinformation, (2) repetition of the retraction or refutation, and (3) corrections that provide an alternative story to help fill the resulting gap in understanding when false ‘facts’ are removed.
Critical thinking requires us to constantly question assumptions, especially our own. To develop these skills, questioning must be encouraged. This runs counter to most schooling and training practices. When do students or employees get to question underlying assumptions of their institutions? If they cannot do this, how can we expect them to challenge various and pervasive types of ‘fake news’?
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more on fake news in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=fake+news