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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.
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.
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.
They are putting personal data like names, photographs on social media. That isn't anything different from having year photographs on school noticeboards and yearbooks.. If they were taking live streamed photographs and recording audio that would be a wiretapping crime.
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Google used to have a good image in my opinion. Their slogan "Don't be evil" rang true for many people. But Google is just like any other corporation, now: They're all about the money. It's too bad the world and people in it don't reward responsibility and Google is actually just fitting into their stupidity and apathy. That being said, I hope Google suffers horribly for this, especially concerning minors. Then again, if parents are too stupid and lazy to care, to hell with their kids, who are pretty much younger versions of themselves. Screw the children now as if their future selves deserve it. For shame!
There are no specific examples of what issues the data collection has created. A Google account is required. Anything entered when setting up the account is used to identify the student so if their Chromebook breaks, they can be assigned another one, login, and be up and running rather quickly. Homework is stored in Google's cloud and checked there by the student's teachers. This story seems like FUD being spread to get schools and parents worried about something that should be of no concern, just as Microsoft is releasing their new Windows Cloud Chromebook competitors. The timing may not be coincidental.
You can thank Apple and the government for that. Apple did (does?) exactly this to develop their initial WiFi map data. They rolled out an update which collected location and nearby WiFi SSID data from people's iPhones and uploaded it to Apple, and buried the fact that they were doing it in the iTunes installation process. Once they got this data by using every iPhone owner as an unpaid hotspot locator, they dumped the Skyhook WiFi map they had been licensing.
Google developed their WiFi map by adding WiFi SSID sniffers to the cars they were driving around the world to take Street View pictures for Google Maps. Someone at the EU claimed they were recording more than just SSID. Google said that was ridiculous, self-audited their collection software, found a developer's setting hadn't been turned off and that they had beent collecting more than just SSID, and self-reported themselves to the EU. The EU and US governments promptly sued and fined them for it. Apple OTOH got off scott free. So Google stopped collecting the WiFi SSID location data collection themselves, and just copied what Apple was doing - lifting the data straight from people's phones.
So maybe they should be like Apple and make it impossible to remove the Play Store?
At least they give you the option to not use the Google Play Store if you don't want to use it. You can use an alternate store like Amazon. Or if you're really paranoid you can just sideload everything directly from your PC. Good luck doing that with the competitors.
Well duh. Without the Google account, the apps have no way of knowing if they were installed after being legitimately purchased, or if they were pirated. The Achilles heel of online software distribution is confirmation of licensing. Either Google does it, with the side-effect that removing the Google account disables the apps. Or every app developer out there including the one-person shops has to run, operate, and maintain their own licensing server 24/7/365.
? My Android tablet didn't. You sure this isn't something the cellular carriers have added to Android phones?
Everyone does this. Google is the only one who lets you see what they've collected on you, and gives you the option to delete it if you wish.
I know they are affordable, but do parents and school boards understand their students' info is being collected and used who knows how?
This is a nice reminder of who and what the REAL threat is. Windows 10 data collection is not the problem. Microsoft doesn't define it's existence on profiling and targeting people, but Google does.
Microsoft doesn't do it because they can't make a cell phone that people want to buy, to save their lives.
It's not like they haven't tried, many times, including buying most of a company that was capable of making cell phones, only to have the parts drift through their fingers, like sand at a beach.
Microsoft would definitely do it if they could work it out, or buy a company that doesn't dissolve as a result of being bought by them.