Money Makes AI Go Round
#NEWSLETTER | Innovation is fueled by capitalism, but AI is also fueled by our data— and this is putting our kids on a data privacy collision course. Also this week, a Talkspace/NYC privacy update.
I’m all for financial incentives to stimulate innovation, but in an age of startup unicorns and billion-dollar tech bros, we seem to have bypassed the part where innovation advances society and instead have gone straight to *show me the money.*
Even worse, commercializing consumer tech used to be about selling you something, but now it’s about coercing you to give something up. And that something is your data.
If we don’t understand the exchange, then it’s not a fair one…
Update on NYC/Talkspace Partnership
Speaking of the fight against the commercialization of our data…
To refresh your memory, I joined Leonie Haimson, co-chair of the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy, and Beth Haroules of the NYCLU, to ask NYC to reconsider its partnership with Talkspace.
You can read our original letter here.
This week we responded to their letter back to us ⤵️
We’ve also made the contract public— you can access that here.
One of the assertions we make is that embedded within the invasive registration pages of the ‘Teenspace’ partnership are more than 60 cookies and trackers sending data real-time to TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, etc. (thanks to Ian and team at web privacy software company Lokker for their help in confirming this number).
Below is just one of the questions kids are asked when they register. Also included in the signup flow are requests for a child’s address, birthday, school, gender identity, email address, etc.
Social media trackers are then quickly able to cross-check this information against a child’s social media account details.
To better understand the implications, you can read my review of the FTC’s scathing report on social media trackers here ⤵️
The Race to Monetize Kids
The biggest giveaway that we’ve passed go and straight to the money exchange with current technology?
Well, it’s the legions of edtech and AI company that use sales teams to schmooze up schools.
This week, the NYC Department of Education held an AI Summit for teachers, superintendents, and other administrators. And who was there to advocate for AI use? You guessed it… young sales execs.
It’s almost like the drug reps visiting a doctor’s office… except we don’t even know what disease is being treated yet.
Why Straight to Sales?
Well, AI requires an unworldly amount of high-quality data. Generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT, also require heavy customer use to improve. And the fact is, kids are of the most enthusiastic ChatGPT users right now. So, they are the target audience for growth (cue the sales teams).
Now, it’s not all doom and gloom, but if families, kids, teachers, and administrators aren’t equal participants in deciding what’s best, then it’s just exploitation.
And in the spirit of accountability, we aren’t doing our kids or our communities much of a favor by not figuring it out ourselves.
What Can We Do?
A recent report from Common Sense Media highlights our lack of digging in and trying these tools ourselves.
The report found that the vast majority of kids (more than 70%) use gen AI chatbots, but only a minority of parents think they do (37%). And teachers are spending too much time catching up and not enough time deciding what’s best from a pedagogical standpoint.
But there are a few things we can do:
Talk to kids and ask if/how they are using AI tools. This seems pretty basic and obvious, but we aren’t doing it. Have your kids show you how they use ChatGPT.
Support teachers in their efforts to figure out how they would like to begin to integrate AI into the classroom. Attend school sessions and meetings on the subject, ask your child’s teacher during parent-teacher conferences… have an opinion and show support.
Use generative AI tools regularly. ChatGPT has gotten a lot faster, smarter, and better. Anthropic’s Claude is great for writing. There is a lot out there. It goes without saying that the more you understand the opportunities and pitfalls, the better an advocate you can be.
Don’t be bamboozled by the sales pitch (either literally or metaphorically). Right now, generative AI tools can be super cool, but they are just, well, tools. Not a person, not a teacher, not magic. They are a mathematical, efficient, sometimes great, sometimes wrong… tool. And we don’t need a slick sales rep to tell us otherwise.
Read the small print. This brings us full circle to our back and forth with NYC regarding Talkspace… the company’s privacy policy gives them wide latitude to use registration data for marketing purposes. Learn to go right to a company’s privacy policy and do a document search (control +F on your keyboard gets you right there) for “marketing.” It will get you far, and you’ll see what we see in this case.
Suggested Reading
Before I let you go…
One of the most important (if not *the* most important) skills we can teach our kids is how to ask a question. This includes questioning conventional wisdom or one’s own beliefs, etc. It also means to remember that learning should be centered around inquiry. It’s also the way we all can maximize any benefit gained from gen AI tools. They are only as good as the question being asked…
To that end, I recommend A More Beautiful Question by Warren Berger. It’s a great reminder of this simple skill that will take our kids far in life.