Don’t allow mental health data mining of our kids

No, no, no. Hell, no! That’s my response to the latest trial balloon floated by the White House to join with Silicon Valley on a creepy program monitoring Americans’ “neurobehavioral signs” to (purportedly) prevent gun violence.

President Donald Trump’s old friend, former NBC head Bob Wright, has been pushing an Orwellian surveillance scheme called “Safe Home” — “Stopping Aberrant Fatal Events by Helping Overcome Mental Extremes” — that would cost taxpayers between $40 million and $60 million. The Washington Post, owned by Amazon billionaire founder Jeff Bezos, reports the plan could incorporate “Apple Watches, Fitbits, Amazon Echo and Google Home.”

Here’s the big lie: Wright’s group promises privacy will be “safeguarded,” profiling “avoided” and data protection capabilities a “cornerstone of this effort.”

There’s so much bull packed in that statement it should be banned as a global warming pollutant.

Let me remind you Google has already admitted to data mining children’s emails without consent and in violation of the Federal Educational Rights and Privacy Act. This school year, untold thousands, if not millions, of children were required to sign on to Google email and Chrome in order to access homework, schedules and classroom discussions — without obtaining parental consent.

Just last week, the Federal Trade Commission approved a settlement with Google/YouTube over its violation of the federal Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. YouTube had been stealthily mining data of unsuspecting YouTube users under the age of 13. It will reportedly pay a pittance for this massive child abuse — somewhere between $150 million to $200 million, which amounts to just a few months’ of YouTube ad revenue.

Earlier this summer, Google agreed to a $13 million settlement over its Street View program, whose roaming cars in more than 30 countries secretly collected emails, passwords and other personal data from Wi-Fi networks. The Wall Street Journal reported on how the company’s dishonest dismissal of the breach as a “mistake” was exposed by investigators who found “Google engineers built software and embedded it into Street View vehicles to intentionally intercept the data from 2007 to 2010.”

It’s not just Google. Under the cloak of “science,” Big Tech and Big Government are on the cusp of instituting a mental health social credit score system incorporating dubious predictive analytics.

Who defines “mental health” risk factors? There is no consensus on how much mental health predicts violence. And don’t forget: The mental health profession is filled with partisan zealots who think all Trump voters are dangerous.

Mental health data mining in schools is already happening. The Pioneer Institute reported that federal, state and local governments splurged on more than $30 billion in 2018 to implement social-emotional learning monitoring in k-12 public schools. Students are rated and recorded on their ability to do things like “respond to emotional cues,” “interact cooperatively” and “cooperate and share ideas and materials in socially acceptable ways.”

Who defines “socially acceptable?”

The last thing Washington should be doing is handing over yet another set of keys to Silicon Valley spies with a voracious appetite for our private information — and our children’s precious minds.