Parents4Privacy

The Parent Coalition for Student Privacy is a national advocacy group of parents, teachers & community members focused on protecting student privacy.

[leonie haimson @leoniehaimson]

“We don’t want kids learning about human relationships fr/ a machine,” Person said. “They ask AI how to handle personal relationships or how to communicate which raises whole slew of questions for me as a parent.”
Yet her kids have “talked” with AI on school-issued Chromebooks.

[leonie haimson @leoniehaimson]

.@NYCCouncil hearing June 24 on AI, student data and privacy @nycschools. Good opportunity for parents and others to speak out & DoE to have to answer hard questions! @EricDinowitzNYC @CarmenForNYC @SpeakerMenin

[leonie haimson @leoniehaimson]

AI collects not just who the student is, what they do on the device, where they are & what they are thinking.There’s so much information collected & its use & security is often a “black box” to educators & officials with a huge privacy risk to students. https://t.co/Qk68fgrTU5

[Child First Policy @ChildFirstPC]

8 in 10 voters say regulating AI is urgent. 80% say protection before innovation, even if it slows things down. Democrats, Republicans, Independents. All of them. This was never political. It's an human issue.

[Fairplay @fairplayforkids]

🧸#AIToys Children lose the wide-ranging benefits of imaginative play when algorithms decide what toys can say.

Read the new op-ed in @commondreams by Fairplay's founder & Young Children Thrive Offline program director! 📰

[CitizensLighthouse @CitizensLight]

@AmericaPapaBear Here is why:
https://t.co/Pd9nPZQgF5

[leonie haimson @leoniehaimson]

If AI tools do not support content knowledge, productive struggle, independent reasoning & human interaction the default should be to omit. The burden of proof should be on the tech companies & policymakers pushing it, not on those questioning it. https://t.co/s4IG8iCNdq

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

Follow the money on this one. It is rotten to the core.

The Pentagon just lent $620,000,000 to a tiny North Carolina startup called Vulcan Elements. The company is two years old.

It had fewer than 50 employees.

And three months before the deal was announced, Donald Trump Jr.’s venture firm quietly took a stake in it.

Here is the part the administration tried to bury.

Of the dozens of companies the Pentagon was weighing, Vulcan was the only deal initiated by a top White House aide. That aide was Peter Navarro, a close friend of Trump Jr. The order came down to move fast.

One official put it plainly: The call came from the White House. We have to get this done.

Staff worked late nights to push it through in weeks. Deals like this normally take many months of vetting. And when it closed, Vulcan’s valuation jumped from about 200 million dollars to roughly 2 billion.

A windfall for the investors, including the president’s son.

This is public money. Your money.

Routed through the Pentagon to enrich the president’s family and their friends. The Bush administration’s own chief ethics lawyer called it corruption we pay for.

And there is more coming.

A drone parts company Trump Jr. holds a stake in is also under Pentagon review.

This is not a one-off. It is a pattern. The president’s family is treating the federal Treasury like a private bank, and the bill lands on every taxpayer.

https://t.co/4kB1cZNmlE

[Parents4Privacy @Parents4Privacy]

From the administration FraudRUs

[JD Vance @JDVance]

Today, the task force and the DOJ announced a massive take down of two of the largest Medicaid fraud cases in Minnesota state history, as well as the largest autism fraud scheme ever charged by the federal government. Our message is simple: if you’re committing fraud, we will find you, and we won’t rest until justice is served.

[Parents4Privacy @Parents4Privacy]

So why did SecDef @PeteHegseth do just that?

[JD Vance @JDVance]

Today’s warfighters have a great moral responsibility in navigating a battlefield that’s new to us all: a battlefield with AI. We must not outsource matters of life and death to machines.

[NY BATs @NYBATs]

FEEDING FRENZY: This “AI-for-toddlers” summit featured guests like Arne Duncan, Rahm Emanuel + Netflix Reed Hastings, billionaire-funded privatizers who forced charters, standardized testing + common core onto parents for decades, now charging vendors to push AI onto all schools:

[Parents4Privacy @Parents4Privacy]

Troubling contracting improprieties

[Susan Edelman @SusanBEdelman]

NEW: Kamar Samuels got a free pass from city school investigators who blasted his former deputy superintendent for violating DOE procurement rules — but failed to reveal that Samuels engaged in the same alleged misconduct.
A flawed report by @NYC_SCI, the agency charged with exposing fraud and corruption in city schools, left Samuels untainted in the months before @NYCMayor appointed him chancellor.
https://t.co/E2wOk9v93R

[Parents4Privacy @Parents4Privacy]

.@rweingarten calls for new gold standard for safety& privacy for use of AI in schools. Providers not meeting
these requirements should not be eligible to serve K12 education. We need to hear what this gold standard means since NYC has flunked in protecting kids’ privacy so far.

[leonie haimson @leoniehaimson]

Randi’s full speech on putting limits on AI & screens calls out Big Tech & White House. “best practices in education, brain research & science of learning too often take a backseat to market forces & political influence.” https://t.co/JRAe7EVuCd

[leonie haimson @leoniehaimson]

In a statement, @nycpublicschools dodged whether AI use in college recommendation letters are permitted & said educators should remain “fully accountable for all content they produce” & “AI should enhance, not replace, professional judgment & expertise.” https://t.co/2990Mq91yI

[Alex Bores @AlexBores]

I just introduced the Anti-Insurrectionist Act in NY. It's simple: If you're a New Yorker who takes from Trump's illegal January 6th slush fund, NY will tax 100% of it.

[State Senator Andrew Gounardes @Sen_Gounardes]

My Stop Online Predators Act is in New York's final budget.

For years, Big Tech turned a blind eye while social and gaming platforms became hotbeds of child exploitation. They’ve been more concerned about profits than safety.

Since they wouldn’t act, we did.

[Alex Prompter @alex_prompter]

Let me trace the timeline here because nobody's connecting it.

Step 1: Scrape the entire internet. Every book, every article, every conversation, every piece of art, every forum post. Do it without asking. Do it without paying.

Step 2: Train a model on all of it. Call it "artificial intelligence."

Step 3: Go to BlackRock's Infrastructure Summit and announce: "We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter."

Step 3 is where you sell people's own knowledge back to them. On a meter.

They took the collective output of human thought, compressed it into a model, and now they want to charge you by the token to access a version of what you and everyone you know already created.

One Reddit user put it perfectly: "They stole all this data from us, the people, our life's work, creativity, art, by devouring the internet and blowing through all copyright laws. Now they want to sell it back to us in the form of a utility."

Imagine if someone photocopied every book in the public library, burned the library down, and then opened a subscription service for the copies.

That's the metered intelligence business model.

And they're pitching it to infrastructure investors as though they invented water.

[leonie haimson @leoniehaimson]

Of course all the research says the opposite. And the answer for a large classes is not substituting teachers with bots but reducing class size - which you tried to obstruct when you worked @nycschools.

[State Senator Andrew Gounardes @Sen_Gounardes]

AI companies want Congress to block states from passing regulations that keep people safe—including our RAISE Act, the strongest AI law in the country.

@alexbores and I have a message for New York’s congressional delegation: don't do Big Tech's bidding.

[Chalkbeat New York @ChalkbeatNY]

Fed up with excessive screen time, one upper Manhattan mom took action. Over 10,000 students in District 6 will swap devices for outdoor play, read-alouds, and improv classes. https://t.co/H9GUHiGAb7