Wednesday, June 12, 2013

AFT’s Randi Weingarten letter about inBloom to Gates & Carnegie Foundations and their reply

Stacey Childress of Gates Foundation

On May 30, 2013, Randi Weingarten, President of the American Federation of Teachers and member of the Technical Advisory Group of the Shared Learning Collaborative, the precursor to inBloom Inc., wrote a letter to Michele Cahill and Stacey Childress, expressing her concern about inBloom’s privacy and security provisions.  Cahill is Vice President at the Carnegie Corporation, and Childress is the Deputy Director of the Gates Foundation, and they are both founding members of inBloom’s Board of Directors.  In
Michele Cahill of Carnegie Corporation
particular, inBloom is a creation of the Gates Foundation, and was launched via $100 million of Gates funds.

In her letter, Weingarten asks many questions, such as:
  • How is inBloom assuring that there is no unauthorized access to personally identifiable student and teacher data? 
  • What are inBloom’s plans to charge vendors for access to student data?
  • How secure is its cloud-based storage compared with other methods?
Check out Weingarten’s letter, and the June 5th response from Cahill and Childress below.



Or download the pdf here: inBloom Letter 

June 5th response:





 Or download the pdf here: Letter to Randi Weingarten

1 comment:

Sheila said...

Nothing new in the letter from inBloom. They might consider doing a better job proofing their letters. It's HIPAA not HIPPA.