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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.

4 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 Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

    2. 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.

  2. Take a close look at Android 6 privacy feature by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?