The Legacy of InBloom

A Bill and Melinda Gates Initiative

Working Paper 02.02.2017 by Monica Bulger, Patrick McCormick, and Mikaela Pitcan.

The initiative was initially funded in 2011 and publicly launched in February, 2013. What followed was a public backlash over inBloom’s intended use of student data, surfacing concerns over privacy and protection. Barely a year later, inBloom announced its closure. Was this swift failure a result of flying too close to the sun, being too lofty in ambition, or were there deeper structural or external factors?

The inBloom initiative occurred during a historically tumultuous time for the public understanding of data use. It coincided with Edward Snowden’s revelations about the NSA collecting data on U.S. civilians sparking concerns about government overreach, the Occupy Wall Street protests surfacing anti-corporation sentiments, and data breaches reported by Target, Kmart, Staples, and other large retailers. The beginnings of a national awareness of the volume of personal data generated by everyday use of credit cards, digital devices, and the internet were coupled with emerging fears and uncertainty. The inBloom initiative also contended with a history of school data used as punitive measures of education reform rather than constructive resources for teachers and students. InBloom therefore served as an unfortunate test case for emerging concerns about data privacy coupled with entrenched suspicion of education data and reform.

‘……the issue is inBloom and education data collection became nuclear and it became synonymous with Big Brother, Edward Snowden, Target, making teachers into robots, putting teachers out of business, social engineering, lack of parent control. They were all fearful words, and once that genie was out of the bottle, you couldn’t bring the conversation back. By the time the powerful

stories that should have been how they introduced the story started getting out, it was too far gone in the public awareness, and the public opinion battles had already been lost.’

Read the entire report here:

https://www.datasociety.net/pubs/ecl/InBloom_feb_2017.pdf