Ask HN: Is Beanstack evil?

Children are lured to a web site to tell a third party what library books they're reading. All the data is mined. It promises to give children "recommendations." One of the company's founders came from Google. Amazon gets involved -- dispensing notifications from Echo devices to children about when it's time to resume reading a specific book. Beanstack's privacy policy reveals they "use IP addresses and session identifiers to analyze trends," as well as "to track user activities, to infer user interests, and to otherwise induce, deduce, and gather information." It also specifically states that they ignore "Do not track" signals. https://www.beanstack.com/privacy That's what my local public library is touting now. (Public libraries are now promoting this -- and are, in fact, paying the third party for it.) BeanStack refers to public libraries as "clients," while bragging on their site that "Our personalized recommendation system remains part of our secret sauce." Mark Cuban invested after hearing their pitch on Shark Tank -- BeanStack is a product of ZooBean. But it was founded six years ago -- before parents were concerned with privacy and tracking. The privacy policy seems to say they're only using this data to provide the service. (And though they're a for-profit service, their business model seems to just be collecting money from schools and public libraries that want to outsource their summer reading program to a company that can add online and app components.) I don't want to be the grinch who killed children's reading programs at my local library. Am I being over-sensitive -- or is there something here to be concerned about. They say their goal is to encourage children to spend less time online -- yet the children are encouraged to go online to tell BeanStack what book's they're reading. (Because otherwise how else could you obtain and mine their data?)