https://www.thefp.com/p/can-china-see-what-your-kid-is-reading

Key excerpts:

Epic, a literacy platform for students, holds data on 75 million American kids—and experts say Beijing could use it for AI training.

If your child attends elementary school in the United States, there is a good chance that the school uses an online reading tool called Epic. Epic hosts over 40,000 books—and its appeal includes the ability to collect data from young readers in real time, which helps teachers and parents develop specialized reading plans based on each student’s skill level and interests.

...Its owner, Epic Kids, was sold to Chinese tutoring company TAL Education Group in bankruptcy court for $95 million in May.

... its online reading tool is used in 94 percent of American elementary schools and reaches the homes of over 75 million kids.

“We don’t see. . . education as a national resource or a national security issue, but it should be,” said Ian Oxnevad, a senior fellow at the National Association of Scholars who has examined numerous efforts by China to shape American colleges and universities. Epic’s takeover “deserves a lot of scrutiny,” he said.

...The company said that it is bound by China’s Data Security Law, which “provides a national security review procedure for those data activities which may affect national security.”

...Ian Oxnevad told me that Epic’s new ownership by a Chinese company creates the risk of Chinese government access to data about Epic’s users, which at the very least can be used as “training material for Chinese AI.”

...Bipartisan political worries about potential Chinese government influence over companies with access to American kids led to last year’s crackdown on TikTok, the social media app run by Chinese company ByteDance...The law banned TikTok from the U.S. unless ByteDance sells it to an American company, but President Trump has continued to grant reprieves,

...The Chinese government also has tried to form relationships with other educational institutions in the U.S. Last fall, the nonprofit group Defending Education revealed that China entered a partnership with Thomas Jefferson High School in Fairfax County, Virginia, that gave a Chinese government–affiliated group access to the school’s curriculum, syllabi, and floor plans. In return, the school, one of America’s top-ranked public high schools, received $3.6 million to fund renovations.

Chinese firms with ties to the CCP have also acquired at least two different military academies with robust Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (JROTC) programs. JROTC programs help produce future U.S. military officers...