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Google Accused of Tracking School Kids After Promising Not To (cio.com)

Posted by Soulskill on from the hand-in-the-cookie-jar dept.

itwbennett writes: In a complaint (PDF) filed Tuesday with the Federal Trade Commission, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) claims that "despite publicly promising not to, Google mines students' browsing data and other information, and uses it for the company's own purposes." The EFF says Google's practice of recording everything students do while they're logged into their Google accounts, regardless of the device or browser they're using, puts the company in breach of Section 5 of the Federal Communications Act.

2 of 131 comments (clear)

  1. i know i wasn't supposed to read TFA, but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Breach of protocol there, sorry, but I read TFA.

    This part seems kinda disturbing:

    some schools require students to use Chromebooks

    Why in the hell are schools requiring students to use Chromebooks? We're making people do business and give their personal deals to advertisers now? What's next, requiring Facebook?

    This also does something much more subtle but very harmful to our society: it gets kids used to the world where nothing they "own" is really theirs, where everything they do is subject to the whims of someone else. Control over their computing devices is held by a multinational, whether Google or Apple or whoever. Instead, we should be getting kids used to freedom, both the power and the responsibility that comes with it.

    1. Re:i know i wasn't supposed to read TFA, but... by Dzimas · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Why in the hell are schools requiring students to use Chromebooks? We're making people do business and give their personal deals to advertisers now? What's next, requiring Facebook?

      Schools standardize on a single platform to make support simpler and to make sure that tools are available on every machine in the classroom. Typically, that means a computer cart loaded with several dozen laptops of some kind. Chromebooks have a distinct advantage for cash-strapped school boards in that they cost about $200 each, compared to five times as much for a cart filled with Macbook Airs. Chromebooks boot in well under 10 seconds, have batteries that will last a full school day, don't require complicated software installation and are immune to common PC viruses and trojans. Kids can use Sheets, Slides and Docs to create and edit school work without the school board having to pay significant licensing fees for an office suite. They save schools a fortune.

      At the end of the day, Microsoft and Apple also track and data mine their users. The core problem isn't that the Big Bad Google is data mining school kids, it's that everyone is doing it. And that needs to stop.