The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a digital rights group, depicts the Internet company as a two-faced opportunist in a complaint filed Tuesday with the Federal Trade Commission.
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The company has told EFF that it plans to disable the Chrome Sync setting on school Chromebooks that allows data to be shared with other Google services. As you would expect, it didn’t take long for Google to deny claims of wrongdoing… Through its “spying on students” campaign, which launched on the 1 December, EFF discovered the violation by examining Google’s Apps for Education as well as the Chromebooks that Google sells cheap to classrooms around the world.
“While we appreciate the EFF’s focus on student data privacy, we are confident that our tools comply with both the law and our promises, including the Student Privacy Pledge, which we signed earlier this year”, Rochelle wrote. The former says the complaint “is without merit”, while the latter notes the EFF has some “misunderstandings about the pledge”, which Google agreed to sign previous year. Rochelle also detailed the specifics on how each of the supposed infringing features aren’t breaking any code or pledge.
The complaint alleges that Google rigged the Chromebook computers in a way that enables the company to collect information about students’ Internet search requests and online video habits. With this feature turned on, Google can allegedly track everything that the student does; Google doesn’t obtain permission from parents or the students, and because Chromebooks are sold directly to schools, parents can’t prevent Google from data mining their children.
“We are calling on the FTC to investigate Google’s conduct, stop the company from using student personal information for its own purposes, and order the company to destroy all information it has collected that’s not for educational purposes”. “If Google wants to use students” data to “improve Google products’, then it needs to get express consent from parents”. “Minors shouldn’t be tracked or used as guinea pigs, with their data treated as a profit center”, Cardozo added.
Google says that advertisements are still absent from the program’s core applications, including Gmail, Drive, Calendar, and Sites.
Google said: “There are not any advertisements in these core services, and pupil data in these types of services isn’t used for marketing purposes”.
EFF states that the information was revealed to its team during the Spying on Students campaign, which aims at looking into privacy risks affiliated with school-supplied software and devices. As an example, Rochelle used the example of millions of people visiting a broken webpage, which would effect its position in search results. The pledge amounts to a legally enforceable document that commits Google to refrain from collecting, using or sharing student’s personal information, unless it is needed for legitimate educational purposes.
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GAFE users’ Chrome Sync data is not used to target ads to individual students.
