The role of “gatekeepers” between “us” and our online activities, such as eLearning and eHealthcare, and all the other online activities, has “come to light” in the last year with a vengeance.
The surreptitious hand of internet 
gatekeepers collects data on pretty much everything we do online, aggregates it, analyzes with machine learning etc, and then sells it to whatever entity might want to pay for it, for their own purposes.
Or as in the recent revelations about DNA analysis sites…the personal data of our biological identity (DNA) is “shared” with law enforcement entities such as the FBI, and in many cases with no awareness that such is ongoing.
Perhaps we should have paid more attention to Andy Grove of Intel…who had escaped communist Hungary as a young man. His 1996 book title: “Only the Paranoid Survive”. Mr. Grove died in 2016 so we can’t get his take on the extremes revealed about online gatekeepers in 2019.
Yet, for civilization to work, there needs to be some faith and some trust in general circulation, and paranoia is a label for a mental illness so perhaps not preferred state, despite our current dark fears being realized in the headlines daily.
When we examine Grove’s ideas in the charts below, we see there’s a strategic inflection point…a sort of fork in the road, between accepting change and maintaining the status quo. Perhaps today our conundrum might need some way to express the idea that we need to “work with change in acceptable ways”. Maintaining the status quo is not a feasible approach in our time, but neither do we want to just passively accept change, especially when it appears to let loose various 1984 type invasions and secret controls of the individual.
Would we do well to heed Yogi Berra’s dictum: when you come to a fork in the road, take it. ?
This has, of course, many implications, from our personal security and safety, to the costs imposed to use online access and services, to the development of startups who need to have “legitimate access to student data to provide learning services” to our willingness to be “open and genuine” when using online tools.
For example…(see the quote below too)…adaptive learning requires a massive data base that can be processed in real time to “kick back” to the student useful links to the next piece of the dynamic learning plan. Answer “A” in a multiple choice, and IRT along comes a suggestion as to what specifically to study next, or what the next part to the lesson plan might be that’s offered.
Somehow that data needs to be acquired, aggregated, and analyzed by huge server farms and giant tech companies using state of the art machine learning and algorithms. Knewton at one time promised a mom and pop version of that functionality…which then evolved into Knewton becoming part of, or merging with, giant textbook publisher Pearson. Pearson recently announced it was pulling back from Knewton. We are still waiting for mom and pop access to rich data to empower real time adaptive learning.
Here’s an Axios article with a quick survey of the present game of “who’s the gatekeeper?”
[gview file=”https://publicservicesalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Tech-Giants-as-Gatekeepers.pdf”]Most of the work in machine-learning-based artificial intelligence that’s already beginning to be widely adopted depends on proprietary dragon- hoards of data controlled by large companies.