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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.
It seems they're contesting that the surveillance Google's operating system is conducting constitutes a non-consensual search. In the context of children being provided a resource that is data-mining their behaviors without their parents mandatory legal consent, it's a very clever point to try and burst that bubble. I think they might should win, too. What Microsoft, Google, and Apple are all doing with their operating systems to survey their users, it might be rightly argued it's crossed into the realm of an unlawful form of surveillance.