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Google Accused of Tracking School Kids After Promising Not To (cio.com)
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.
You should also take a damn close look at Android 6 privacy features. The new feature that lets users turn off rights to GPS, camera etc. for apps after installation.
On the face of it it sounds good, but the way they've done it is absolutely the opposite:
It lets an app install first, then demand priviledges as it goes along. It *tells* the app you are refusing it access to the camera or mic or address book, or location, or SMS's etc. So the app can slowly sucker you in Facebook style demanding more and more privileges to run as it has more and more leverage over you. You mid conversation a messaging app can demand access to your address book to let you finish the conversation, and Google's Android 6 will tell it if you refuse.
Google Player Services, aka Google's spyware* gets a free ride and its spyware can't be turned off. This service tracks location and even if you disable all Google services they continue to get the information. That is just the tip of the iceberg as to what that tracks.
Other similar features in other Android distributions, return empty data to the app, so it might demand access to the camera, but the camera data it gets is a noise image, and it might demand your address book, but it gets an empty address book instead if you refuse it access. So the app cannot know it has been refused access to the data and cannot leverage that to force you to give it access.
* Seriously take a good look at what that 'play' store is sending to Google, it helps itself to everything, and requests location even when the phone is on standby.
They are a privacy disaster and where the fook are the regulator?
There's probably an algorithm for projected income from the mined data versus likely fines for breach of conduct.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
The other alternatives are things like Linux and BSD. You know, devices beholden to their owners. As a side benefit, we might end up with more computer literate individuals instead of people who can't do anything more sophisticated than what someone else allowed a single mouse click to do.
Nah I bet it is a simple algorithm.
In order to determine if they are a minor or not, they determine if they are viewing porn or not. If they are viewing porn then they must not be a minor thus open to tracking data.
Easy algorithm.
Because kids are only exposed or search for it after they reach 18 years of age.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
i don't understand why this got downvoted. "let's roll out BSD to these kids' computers" --- said noone ever!
at conferences, i occasionally meet people who've attempted to migrate a school or at least a class to gnu/linux. it's always the same Don Quixotic story. first, there's the smartarse child who complains at home that he's no longer a computer whizz (whizz = plays call of duty at home), then it's parents ganging up on the headmaster to complain and then it always ends with the headmaster or local school council gloriously announcing a new deal with MS.
i've only ever met ONE portuguese guy who was semi successful with gnu/linux in an educational environment.