The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has decided to forgo the opportunity to crack down on mass privacy overreach of educational technology companies by deferring the matter to the Department of Education’s Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). This coming at a time when the Trump administration wants to weaken the education department, looks like a big a gift to edtech companies which have run amok sharing data without clear restrictions.
Meta has paid $14.3 billionen for 49% stake in Scale AI, which prepares training data for AI systems, and recruited its founder, Alexander Wang, to work on Meta’s own AI program. Scale AI will continue as an independent vendor, now valued at $29 billion. Scale’s clients include nearly all genAI vendors.