The EFF’s discovery that Google is using the Chromebooks it provided to public schools to collect the search and browsing data of students unfortunately comes as no real surprise. Google is, after all, in the business of monitoring and storing user search data to benefit its own ends – corporate advantage tends to trump data privacy rights. But what’s especially galling about this particular breach of privacy is that it’s committed against minors and the teachers we depend on to educate our future generations.
The idea that 40 million students and teachers throughout the country could have their search and browsing data collected without their prior consent or knowledge – or the consent and knowledge of the parents – show just how far big data brokers like Google are willing to go in the pursuit of your private information. That this directly contradicts the Student Privacy Pledge they signed back in January, where they promised to do just the opposite, is just the icing on the cake when it comes to violating our and our children’s online civil liberties.
Google is saying in a quick rebuttal that it only collects this data in order to provide services, improve the student’s user experience and enable device-independent access of personal data and preferences for the students. While this is probably true, Google could also easily encrypt such data with the student’s passwords and make it inaccessible to the company itself. Additionally, Google even admits that their “systems compile data aggregated from millions of users” to learn more about what they are doing, and yes, enhance the service even further, and do…well, whatever Google fancies.
If Google were, in fact, true to its promise, there would be easy ways to provide most of the features Google uses to explain the data gathering, without Google actually being able to further process them. But that’s obviously not their business model.