[tekromancr]

Thank you! I happen to work in the edtech industry, and student privacy is one of those totems that i'm always scratching my head about. All of these edtech companies are always being accused of collecting student data for marketing purposes, but honestly, I don't think homework or attendance records are particularly valuable to anyone but a student, parents, and teachers. I think it's pretty asinine that anyone would think that that type of data is monetizable. I think the problem is really our (as technologists) fault. We tend to refer to any data as data, when we should be specifying what types of data we are referring. Personal details vs activity data vs application analytical data, etc.

[hardwaresofton]

I want to note that just because the data doesn't "look" valuable to you now doesn't mean it isn't. There are lots of types of data that didn't seem valuable before people connected some dots and realized they are.

Attendance records could be very valuable. If I can determine trends in what days you attend school, which classes you attend, and with which frequency, I might be able to create an even more specific advertising audience to sell to ad publishers. "high school students who showed affinity for Cooking class" (assuming most high schools even offer a home ec/cooking class) might be a very compelling ad segment to some up-and-coming social baking app or something.

[robk]

Sorry that's just not how targeted advertising works. Seriously with MySpace you had TONS AND TONS of data about posting history, likes, affinities and such and it made virtually no impact on monetization. Things like attendance are laughably irrelevant to ad dollars.