Data Privacy Concerns Sink Gates-Funded Education Startup

Lingering concerns about the privacy of children proved to be an insurmountable obstacle for lavishly endowed education startup, inBloom. The idea was to data-mine students to create customized instruction materials. Funders included the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York. But the information the company required included things like details about family life, learning disabilities and even social security numbers. Critics were alarmed, protests and lawsuits erupted in a number of states, and when New York state passed legislation limiting the extent to which education officials could release data to companies like inBloom – and demanded that inBloom delete the data that it held – the company decided to call it quits.