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EFF Says Google Chromebooks Are Still Spying On Students (softpedia.com)
schwit1 quotes a report from Softpedia: In the past two years since a formal complaint was made against Google, not much has changed in the way they handle this. Google still hasn't shed its "bad guy" clothes when it comes to the data it collects on underage students. In fact, the Electronic Frontier Foundation says the company continues to massively collect and store information on children without their consent or their parents'. Not even school administrators fully understand the extent of this operation, the EFF says. According to the latest status report from the EFF, Google is still up to no good, trying to eliminate students privacy without their parents notice or consent and "without a real choice to opt out." This, they say, is done via the Chromebooks Google is selling to schools across the United States.
Take a look at Android, it's a very scammy surveillance OS.
1. Your location is transmitted to Google, together with surrounding wifi settings. They do this with a popup that appears whenever you turn on GPS, it asks you if you want to improve location accuracy, in actuality it's tracking the surrounding wifi spots and matching them against the GPS location your phone records. The dialog is written so you think you need to say yes to get GPS to work, but you can say no and GPS still works.
It always appears, all the time, until you say yes, and then it doesn't popup again, quietly tracking your location and watching your nearby wifi hotspots.
You cannot say 'no, never' the dialog will keep pestering.
2. Google Play Store, if you try to disable or remove this, it will remove every app you installed from the playstore at the same time. Google play store provides Google with your credit card linkage, and real id, to the location and search surveillance it does.
3. You cannot remove the required google account and keep the apps you installed.
4. Android now INSISTS on a telephone number for Android device registrations.
5. Google changes the privacy terms frequently, it popups says "action required" and if you refuse to say yes to whatever privacy invasion they've introduced, the alternate options are to delete your Google account (and uninstall every app you installed, see 2). This is false, you can simply ignore the demand to accept the change of terms.
6. Did you agree to backup the phone? That pester message that pops up regularly that you can't tell "no never' to? You just gave Google the password to every wifi network and business server you ever used. Compromising a lot of data.
They present a set of information in a privacy dashboard that is a tiny subset of the information they actually record. All pages visited with Google stats and Google adverts, and Google content served are also known to them and recorded by them. Your Youtube viewing is recorded even when logged out using browser profile id. Same with Google search, it persters you to login, but if you don't they still record the searches you make against the browser id to cross link for when you eventually do login.
Really, Duckduckgo for search and avoid them like the plague and they'll still have a mass of tracking information on you. You cannot opt out of this, they present it as the price for having an Android device.
Google are surveillance-ware shit.
We live in the Surveillance Age now. For better or worse we must expect each and every action we make to be recorded and watched. We must expect each and every word to say to be recorded and listened to. We must expect our existence to be constantly observed and analyzed. This will not stop. Ever. There is no way out. Anyone trying to avoid surveillance is automatically marked a "person of interest". You don't want to be on a blacklist, do you? Gotta work to eat.
There is also the matter of what is done with the information. Is Google seeking to manipulate the choices of children regardless of the psychological harm that causes those children. Peer pressure is the marketing tool of choice, using peer pressure damages children, those who stigmatise others and the victims of that psychological attack, the penalty applied to children for the parents failure to buy the products demanded by adults with degree in marketing and psychological. That would be child abuse upon a mass scale. Even in parents consent to the information being gathered, I strongly doubt they would accept psychologically trained professional adults manipulating children to feed the greed of those adults, with total disregard to the psychological impact upon those children the Goolge's trained professionals are preying upon. Not them alone of course, M$ and now even the ISPs are also looking to psychological prey upon and manipulate children.
Time for a complete ban on collecting information about minors and targeting them with marketing, a complete across the board ban.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
I suspect the problem is there isn't anything really illegal about it, it's just unethical from the EFF's point of view.
Unfortunately for them, ethics is something subjective and large corporations generally don't have.
All they can do is try and raise outrage on the consumer/government level and hope it's enough to get Google to change.
Time for a complete ban on collecting information about minors and targeting them with marketing, a complete across the board ban.
How about it's time for a complete ban on collecting information about anyone without consent. Make it opt-in. If targeted ads are better and really lead to "an enriched and engaging experience that customers will enjoy interacting with", as all privacy-averse marketing drones claim, then people will opt-in en masse in order not to be stuck with the boring old untargeted ads.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...