Linked: “Google is tracking students as it sells more products to schools, privacy advocates warn”

via WaPo:

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 can’t keep the company from collecting their children’s data, privacy experts say.

You pay for what you get.

If I was a parent, I would flat out refuse in writing that my child use Google services and take the fight to the school board and yes, change schools if they did not comply. The injection of Google services into our children to teach them from a young age that services and computers are free / really cheap will plague their buying habits forever and there’s no education to parents or students that this is free because Google is documenting and tracking everything you do and using that data to build models of your habits so they can sell this data to advertisers.

I’m not surprised Google is doing this but I wasn’t aware that there’s a school Chromebook program that is used by millions of kids in our country.

The EFF has filed a petition with the FTC against Google. Yet another reason to continue my yearly auto-donation to EFF. They do good work.

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