Google Spying on 40 Million K-12 Students, Privacy Advocates Call for Federal Sanctions
The Electronic Frontier Foundation calls for federal sanctions.
Unlike its website declaration, Google’s “Apps for Education” isn’t a tool that “schools can trust,” because it is spying on 40 million K-12 students and compiling all their online activities even though it pledged not to do that, according to online privacy advocates.
“Google is violating the Student Privacy Pledge in three ways,” said the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), in a complaint filed with the Federal Trade Commission. “First… student personal information in the form of data about their use of non-educational Google services is collected, maintained, and used by Google for its own benefit, unrelated to authorized educational or school purposes.”
“Second, the “Chrome Sync” feature of Google’s Chrome browser is turned on by default on all Google Chromebook laptops – including those sold to schools as part of Google for Education – thereby enabling Google to collect and use students’ entire browsing history and other data for its own benefit,” EFF continues. “And third, Google for Education’s Administrative settings, which enable a school administrator to control settings for all program Chromebooks, allow administrators to choose settings that share student personal information with Google and third-party websites.”
EFF’s complaint to the Federal Trade Commission urges it to open an investigation into the company’s violation of privacy pledge drafted by the Future of Privacy Forum and Software & Information Industry Association, which Google signed last January. EFF notes that the FTC takes industry-created privacy pledges seriously, and “has brought enforcement actions against companies that made privacy-related promises to their costumers and then violated those promises.”
In 2011, Google paid “a $22.5 million civil penalty to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that it misrepresented to users of Apple Inc.’s Safari Internet browser that it would not place tracking “cookies” or serve targeted ads to those users, violating an earlier privacy settlement between the company and the FTC,” the complaint said.
In public, Google claims to be a big privacy advocate. However, according to EFF, the 40 million K-12 students who use its laptops and software tools are unaware that it “collects, maintains, and uses records of essentially everything that student users of Google for Education do on Google services, while they are logged in to their Google accounts, regardless of which device or browser they use.”
This may not be surprising to adults, who are used to Internet companies tracking their every search and move—mostly to analyze consumer preferences and target them for ads. But the privacy pledge that Google signed is supposed to protect the youths’ “personally identifiable information as well as other information when it is both collected and maintained on an individual level and is linked to personally identifiable information.” That includes all web searches, browsing, YouTube videos watched, all websites visited, other applications installed and passwords.
“Such data reveals highly personal information about students and is not necessary to deliver educational services,” EFF’s complaint said. “Google not only collects and stores the vast array of student data described above, but uses it for its own purposes such as improving Google products and serving targeted advertising (within non-Education Google services), as Google has represented to EFF.”
Google contends that it “anonymizes” this data—stripping off student identitiesGoogle Spying on 40 Million K-12 Students, Privacy Advocates Call for Federal Sanctions | Alternet:
