Dear Commons Community,

The New York State Education Department acknowledged earlier this week that it will reverse plans to store student data on a controversial cloud-based service called inBloom.

“As required by statute, we will not store any student data with inBloom and we have directed inBloom to securely delete the non-identifiable data that has been stored,” department spokesman Tom Dunn said.

The statement is an acknowledgement of recently passed state legislation that prohibits the state from giving student data to inBloom or other vendors to store and manage.

inBloom is the corporation funded by the Gates Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation ($100 million from Gates) to collect personal, identifiable student data. The software was created by Wireless Generation, part of Joel Klein’s Amplify, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. The data is stored on a “cloud” managed by amazon.com.

Dunn said the department will continue to explore “alternative paths” to help schools access “secure and cost-effective educational technology tools that empower and support our teachers, students, and their families.”

The plan to use inBloom to manage extensive data on all students was widely criticized by parents and educators who were concerned about the security of the data and possible use of it by third-party vendors like inBloom. The Education Department maintained that the data was secure and that vendors were barred from selling or sharing it. 

Thank God that there are some sane officials in Albany that forced the NYS Education Department to take this action.

Tony