Google is tracking students as it sells more products to schools, privacy advocates warn
Source: Washington Post
In public classrooms across the country, the corporate name that is fast becoming as common as pencils and erasers is Google.
More than half of K-12 laptops or tablets purchased by U.S. schools in the third quarter were Chromebooks, cheap laptops that run Google software. Beyond its famed Web search, the company freely offers word processing and other software to schools. In total, Google programs are used by more than 50 million students and teachers around the world, the company says.
But Google is also tracking what those students are doing on its services and using some of that information to sell targeted ads, according to a complaint filed with federal officials by a leading privacy advocacy group.
And because of the arrangement between Google and many public schools, parents often cant keep the company from collecting their childrens data, privacy experts say.
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/12/28/google-is-tracking-students-as-it-sells-more-products-to-schools-privacy-advocates-warn
Shocker.
burrowowl
(17,644 posts)SusanCalvin
(6,592 posts)Business as usual.
Joe Shlabotnik
(5,604 posts)they are consumers, or fodder, or data or sumthin'. See capitalism makes everything all good.
SunSeeker
(51,660 posts)chapdrum
(930 posts)Further inroads made by yet another Overlord.
DAMANgoldberg
(1,278 posts)Apple and Microsoft also target the K-12 market, and I'm pretty sure that they do tracking as well. However, Apple and Microsoft has business models that don't rely on advertising as heavily as Google. I must say that I only know employees personally of one of those companies, Microsoft, as they have significant operations here.
Besides, a Chromebook is realistically useless without an broadband connection. At least MS products can be used effectively offline. Apple doesn't have an equivalent to the Chromebook or MS Cloudbook.
99th_Monkey
(19,326 posts)this demographic will be hard-wired into the 'matrix' for the harvest.