According to a Fox News report, a Chinese-owned financial corporation that provides torturing services via Tutor.com is potentially a serious privacy concern as it grants the CCP access to the private information of American citizens — including a large number of servicemembers.
Parents Defending Education and Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton are blowing the whistle.
The Tutor.com website describes itself as “dedicated to promoting equity, opportunity, and achievement for all learners” that partners with “colleges and universities, K–12 schools and districts, public and state libraries, employee benefits programs, and the U.S. military to provide 24/7, on-demand tutoring and homework help in more than 250 subjects.”
Tucked away at the bottom of the site, users find this message:
“Tutor.com is controlled by Primavera Holdings Limited, a firm owned by Chinese nationals with a principal place of business in Hong Kong, China.”
According to Parents Defending Education, at least 100 school districts across the nation give students access to Tutor.com.
“For years, school districts around the country have been far too cavalier in their treatment of student data: collecting detailed information about students and families, improperly storing sensitive personal information, and greatly expanding the number of ‘EdTech’ vendors who can access these files,” PDE president and founder Nicole Neily told Fox News Digital.
“Tutor.com is the latest – but without a doubt, far from the last – concerning firm with access to student information, and it’s unlikely that most American families would be comfortable with a foreign-owned company maintaining this data,” Neily continued. “Parents deserve more control over who is collecting information about their children, because districts are completely asleep at the switch.”
Last month, Senator Tom Cotton implored the Department of Defense to share information regarding its contract with Tudor.com. Cotton called the partnership with Primavara Holdings “ill-advised, reckless.”
“We should not be giving the Chinese communists access to the data of United States servicemembers and their families,” Cotton, a member of the Senate’s intelligence committee, previously told Fox News Digital. “I look forward to a full explanation from the Department of Defense on their continued use of Tutor.com.”
“While providing educational services, Tutor.com collects personal data on users, such as location, internet protocol addresses, and contents of the tutoring sessions,” Cotton wrote. “As Chinese national security laws require companies to release confidential business and customer data to the Chinese government, we are paying to expose our military and their children’s private information to the Chinese Communist Party.”
Will Primavara Holdings go the way of TikTok’s ByteDance? If lawmakers are smart, it will be met with similar scrutiny.
