Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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?
once Pandora's box has been opened.
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
... to maximize profits.
Google signed a piece of paper saying they would not do these things, apparently legally binding piece of paper. That makes just about everything you've said irrelevant to the FA, since it isn't about whether the school can mine students data (they can).
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.
If they are in violation, then fine, be pissed. But data collection does not imply use for unauthorized purposes. I collect phone and address data on my customers. I do not use it to stalk them.
Silence is a state of mime.
With our do-nothing government, someone has to step up and do the opposite of what they said they were going to do.
If google just changes their name to facebook then everyone will say it's fine and dandy. The problem here is just that people used to expect google not to do this kind of thing, while facebook started off explicitly designed to do this kind of thing.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
"Who's that hiding in my kid's closet with handcuffs and a gunnysack? Molester Joe! You silly-billy! When I hired you to babysit my kids, you promised you weren't going to try to kidnap them! You even signed a contract to that effect!
"Well, it's my fault, really--I knew you wouldn't be able to resist. All right, but this is your second strike. Five more strikes and I'll have to report it. Now get outta here, you scamp!"
Perhaps you should read the claim more closely. Google *agreed* not to spy on students (and yes I did use the word spy because that is what they're doing). This formed part of the basis for which Schools used their services. Since schools have a legal obligation to keep private student data private, this was essential to them.
Yet Google doesn't honor that agreement, and thus exposes the schools to legal consequence:
"Google’s practices fly in the face of commitments made when it signed the Student Privacy Pledge, a legally enforceable document whereby companies promise to refrain from collecting, using, or sharing students’ personal information except when needed for legitimate educational purposes or if parents provide permission."
"EFF’s filing with the FTC also reveals that the administrative settings Google provides to schools allow student personal information to be shared with third-party websites in violation of the Student Privacy Pledge. The ability to collect and potentially share student information follows children whenever they use Chrome to log into their Google accounts, whether on a parents’ Apple iPad, friend’s smartphone or home computer."
"EFF's cloud "sync" argument isn't too solid. Google's system of syncing data between devices is the entire point of Google Apps and their Chrome OS system"
No, its an OPTIONAL feature that is turned on by default for School Chromebooks. Sure this might be the point of Chrome from Google's perspective (gaining market advantage by having access to private data), but that does not make it the schools entire purpose!
once upon a time on slashdot you'd get modded troll for even hinting that google might actually be capable of evil. good times.
He once inserted random mutations into his code, just so he could have the experience of debugging.
With ipads and chromebooks everywhere, why aren't kids getting any smarter?
this is the first actual proof of evilness in my mind. Others were dubious but this is a bright line they just crossed. Just changed my mail address over to apple, and my browser to duckduck.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
"Don't be evil... unless, you know, being evil is profitable, and you don't think anyone will notice, then go for it!"
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Oh my God, they are a corporation whose primary responsibility is to make money for stockholders, just like every other corporation in the world!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
And the connection between the founder of Facebook and Google collecting data on kids is...?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
and Chromebooks and iThings are in fashion and are tracking kids, obviously. Where I work (secondary ed), people mandate children create gmail accounts and whatnot with no thought whatsoever to what that means.
This is not surprising at all and I'm glad that I support the EFF.
... to our yearly revenues.
No, in all cases I've seen, the Chromebooks are owned by the school and issued out to the kids when needed in certain classes. The schools aren't demanding the kids buy Chromebooks themselves to use for classwork outside of school.
So say they do comply. They collect information, but don't use it to target advertising, etc. There are two kinds of information Google can collect, actual documents and emails stored on Google's servers, and general search and browsing history. The first is in the nature of those services - no way to not 'collect' it and still provide the service. I guess you could make a similar argument for search and browsing history too - tracking history makes search work better.
I suppose they could run normal Google in schools and just not present ads. That'd keep the services working, and would probably meet the above requirements. Or they could also present non-targeted advertising. I.e., present ads targeted at the broad demographic of school kids that doesn't rely on any kid-specific mined data. That'd probably be okay-ish. Maybe better if they blocked ads when accessing the service via a school IP address.
But what happens when they are at home? Or when they grow up and continue to use Google services? I'm guessing that all bets are off at that point. They get the same targeted advertising as any other Google user. Now, I'd argue that Google's advertising is not 'evil', since it funds the free services and no info is shared directly - or even viewed by humans. But some still have a problem with that. I guess a concerned kid - or his parents - could drop the Google services at that point. But, yeah, these free services for schools are meant to hook kids into an ecosystem. That's why Apple, and then Microsoft, offered free stuff to school kids in the past, and we didn't like it then. I suppose that if Google services let you export your saved info in standard formats that allow you to continue to access it without Google - and if they then let you wipe your info from their servers - that'd be pretty okay. The only problem would be if, say, Google Docs became so ubiquitous that there were no alternatives to import those documents to. Any chance of that...?
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
Google syncs student data to their servers, including web searches, because Chromebooks back up everything to the cloud. If you back up your Windows machine to the cloud, you back up your search history as well. Nothing in the EFF's press release suggests that they have shown that Google does anything more than this, let alone "mines" that data or "uses it for the company's own purposes".
Any data generated using school systems is property of the school or school district.
Student data does not belong to the student. No one is forcing kids to put "their data" (whatever that means) on anyone else's computer.
From Google's Apps for Education Common Questions page:
https://support.google.com/a/a...
Will there be advertisements with Google Apps?
For all EDU domains, ads are turned off in Google Apps for Education services and K–12 Google Apps for Education users don't see ads when they use Google Search and are signed in to their Apps for Education accounts.
It is ludicrous that in the present day, instead of educating people on the use of computers and networking, and therefore also including privacy implications, these fuckwits just want their jobs and their lives to be easier. Kids should be able to bring any capable device they like, which only connects to the schools secure servers. Using google services to a minimum is what needs to be taught here. Handing everything over to googles servers is yet one more reason our educational system is one big pile of shit designed to do nothing but line peoples pockets. Modern education is truly a monumental travesty of laziness and greed. Actually teaching something? Priceless and yet not even in the picture.
Students have no expectation of privacy when using school supplied computer systems (Reichert v. Elizabethtown College).
Students have no expectation of privacy *from the school*. They have every expectation of privacy from a random company not associated with the school system.
Say you buy a backyard pool for the kids. You allow the pool installer into your back yard while they're working. A month later, your 13 year old daughter is swimming in her bikini; as your dad, it's ok to take a picture. If the swimming pool installer snuck in and started taking pictures of her, would you be creeped out? In this case, Google is acting just like a pedophile - closely watching kids even when they said that they would not.
Of course; minors would never use the internet to browse porn.
Exactly. In our district, we have a BYOD program, but if kids bring their own Chromebook, it is THEIR Chromebook. It's merely subject to our filters when it's connected to our network.
they only give a fuck about their phones. It's rare to see a kid in the hall at my school who isn't completely absorbed by a glowing rectangle zombie walking down the hall as slow as possible with ear buds in.
If you don't trust Google how does that help? They still control the browser, the OS, and the encryption. And they still store all the files.
How about if you had a private key used to encrypt the data before it was synced?
Google actually provides that. You can set a sync password which is used to derive a key that is used to encrypt the data before it's synced.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
If you don't trust Google how does that help? They still control the browser, the OS, and the encryption. And they still store all the files.
Well, the sync password encryption algorithm is in Chromium, so you can see exactly how it works. It's harder to prove that Google doesn't sync plaintext in addition to (or instead of) the encrypted content. That would require breaking the TLS connection security -- which is possible on a dev mode Chromebook, you just need to extract the ephemeral key pair from the browser, use that to decrypt the TLS stream, then verify that only the encrypted data is synced and that it's encrypted the same way as in the open source browser.
It would be a bit of work. If you did it and proved that Google was sending unencrypted data even though you'd set a sync password, though, you'd be famous.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
I doubt they'd do anything so blatant; they'd more likely just do data mining on the client and then send the mining results back to the server.
A long time ago, in a galaxy far away, I had to deal with data volumes that were pretty much unheard of at the time. Google sold an appliance that (supposedly) made searching this data much easier. While it never worked quite as well as we'd hoped, it worked to some extent (it was not really able to be tuned to give good relevance scores for the data we used) and it wasn't entirely lost revenue.
At any rate... Why not sell an appliance or, better, software that enables the school to run their own private cloud with Google's services? Hmm... Someone should do this over there at Google's HQ. I don't really want a job but they should hire someone to actually think about these sorts of things. A district or even a whole State could have its own private cloud. They could even configure the devices to use them when they're not directly connected to the network and that'd be fairly trivial to accomplish.
Google would make money (maybe not as much as they'd like and they'd not get the data which sucks but they'd still profit) and compliance would be trivial to accomplish. 'Snot like it's rocket surgery or anything. Even I can think of ways to do this. They don't even need to give up their source, they can run it on a black box if they absolutely needed to (though I'm not sure who'd trust such a thing but that's what firewalls are for).
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
I doubt they'd do anything so blatant; they'd more likely just do data mining on the client and then send the mining results back to the server.
You could also see that if you broke the TLS encryption. And would get almost as famous. I'm tempted to do it and publish my findings, but there's no point because (a) I'm quite certain I wouldn't find anything hinky and (b) since I work for Google no one would believe a negative result. I'd like to see someone not associated with Google do this: breaking into TLS on a Chromebook and monitoring everything that gets sent to Google and comparing it with Google's public statements about privacy.
Hmm. https://jimshaver.net/2015/02/... indicates that there may actually be a really easy way to decrypt TLS traffic from Chrome. It's not clear how difficult the key logging would be to set up on ChromeOS. I'm going to ask some of my ChromeOS buddies. Maybe, if it's easy enough, I will do this myself. No one will believe my results but I can document the methodology for them to replicate.
(Aside: I've been toying with the idea of building a "dump all traffic, unencrypted" tool into Android, specifically to make it easy for people to verify exactly what Android devices do and do not send to Google -- and other parties. I'm not sure it can be done in a way that ensures that only the user can do it, though, and making such a built-in tool available to attackers would be a Bad Thing.)
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
If Google wanted to smuggle data about kids back to their servers, they could do that steganographically, in DNS queries or images or battery usage reports. Since Google seems to be using a lot of deep learning for data mining, the data you are looking for would also be just a bunch of floating point numbers, data that may not even be decodeable using any information on the device.
My point is that you can demonstrate the presence of data leakage, but you can't conclusively prove its absence to people who start with the assumption that Google is dishonest and adversarial. There is nothing Google can do to satisfy the EFF, and if the EFF doesn't believe Google's pledges or audits, then the EFF should simply recommend that schools don't use Google at all, instead of filing complaints. Of course, the same is true for Apple and Microsoft, who have similar ecosystems of OS control, diagnostic data, online backup, app stores, and online services.
If Google wanted to smuggle data about kids back to their servers, they could do that steganographically, in DNS queries or images or battery usage reports. Since Google seems to be using a lot of deep learning for data mining, the data you are looking for would also be just a bunch of floating point numbers, data that may not even be decodeable using any information on the device.
Steganographically-embedded data is a little bit difficult, but most protocols don't have much room for embedding information from the client. You can do it in DNS, but only by adding unusual extensions to your queries. Form posts are a good one, since you have a fair number of bits to play with in the boundary strings. You could do a little bit with TLS key agreement negotiations. But still, these are pretty narrow channels. As for data that isn't decodeable, the presence of undecodeable data would be cause for concern... if it were present.
My point is that you can demonstrate the presence of data leakage, but you can't conclusively prove its absence to people who start with the assumption that Google is dishonest and adversarial.
No, but you can convince people who hold more moderate positions.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.