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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.