Software Company “Infinite Campus” Lies
Recently, there have been two comments on my blog about Infinite Campus, both of which praise the quality of Infinite Campus. They were both made within an hour and a half. Hmmm… I thought I’d better look into this one a little bit more.
They were a lot worse than I initially thought.
The emails were both fake, unless you believe “info4nancy@comcast.net” and “jeff@jeff.com” to be legit email addresses. The two comments said nothing but good things about this “amazing” company. They were both apparently from people with authority in large school districts; at least, they implied being from different school districts. The comments were written in different styles of writing, so one may think they were from different people.
I agree that one should not jump to conclusions. I won’t.
I thought I would check the IP addresses. What a surprise. They were the same. Why not look that one IP address up on an IP locator out of curiosity? Hmm… The IP was “207.225.137.8″, so the location is “Minneapolis, MN”. That’s interesting. That is where their headquarters is located. Oh! This is even more interesting! The ISP field says “Infinite Campus”. Do I need a screenshot to prove this? This commenter believes I need to “check my facts” before writing, so this screenshot will give the reader an opportunity to do so for his/herself.
One of two conclusions can be drawn by this.
- Just recently, another school district opened in Minneapolis. Both this school district, and the existing school district in Minneapolis have broken into a single computer at the Infinite Campus HQ and tunneled through it to steal their bandwidth. The company Infinite Campus has no idea this is going on, because nothing has been done to stop it.
- Infinite Campus, as a company, LIED to the general public to try to get more business.
I’ll assume the latter.
It is scary to me, though, to know that proprietary software companies as well known and widely used as Infinite Campus must LIE to retain their status. We trust these companies with so much, especially those who make a Student Information System. Every known piece of personal information about students and their families is put into this system, including a picture. How can we, in all honesty, know that they haven’t lied to us again? It is very possible that there is an intentional security hole in there so creepy employees can stalk random students. This would put more control into their hands than even MySpace or Facebook has. There is no way to find out, but I can tell you one thing: I don’t want my information in there! I don’t want my school to unintentionally exploit a creative way to bypass information privacy laws!
This all just goes to show that money comes first for greedy proprietary software companies like Infinite Campus. Money comes before education. Money comes before freedom. Money comes before morals. Shouldn’t education software companies in particular actually come so far as to think about the morals that educators are trying to instill in their students?
Hey, employees at Infinite Campus! Give some ethical software a try. You can take your first steps with one of my previous blog posts. Even if you never went to college, just like your CEO, you might just learn something!
Link: http://trombonechamp.wordpress.com/2009/02/23/software-company-infinite-campus-lies/
