Technology is essential to the learning process in classrooms and thus, the use of Google products is becoming more and more prevalent in schools in the United States.
According to Washington Posts' article, “Google Sets off Student Privacy Feud,” by Andrea Peterson, more than half of the laptops or tablets bought by schools in the United States for kindergarteners to seniors in high school in the third quarter of 2015 were Chromebooks, which run on Google software. Overall, Google programs are operated by 50 million students and teachers across the globe.
Controversy has risen over the data that Google collects through its many services. According to the same Washington Post article, Google has been tracking what students are doing on its programs and based on this information Google advertises products that are most likely appealing to these students.
Peterson writes that Google signed an agreement pledging to restrict how it compiles and applies data it obtains from students this past year. The digital rights nonprofit organization Electronic Frontier Foundation or EEF; however, believes that “Google is tracking everything students are doing when they are signed into their Google accounts,” Peterson added. This data can be used to create profiles and display specific advertisements.
“Google…pushed back against the criticism, saying its education apps comply with the law. But it acknowledged it collects data about some student activities to improve its products,” Peterson wrote.
EFF believes that Google’s new feature Google Synch is another violation of privacy. According to Peterson, this program provides the option of letting users transfer “browsing histories, passwords, and other personalized features” between any Chromebook or Chrome browser they log into. EFF worries this is another attempt by Google to track students’ activity and use it for further advertisements.
This is not the first time that Google has come under fire for violating privacy rights. According to the article “Right to be Forgotten? Not that Easy,” published in The New York Times by Danny Hakim, in 2014 the European high court required the company to consider people’s requests to eliminate links which harm their privacy. These links included unwanted videos, photos, or information about individuals.
“Privacy is deeply connected with the protection of personal honor in Europe,” said James Q. Whitman, a Yale law professor.
Hakim writes that some technology companies have spun this issue as limiting the freedom of information, saying that the rights of individual hinder this. Despite this argument, there is still distrust when it comes to U.S. surveillance, which factored in as a substantial part of the court decision.
According to this article, Europe has a history of protecting individual rights online, with each nation in the European Union possessing a protection agency that individuals can go to who want to delete unfavorable information about themselves online.
In the Unites States, student privacy laws are becoming more and more apparent as of recently. Peterson cites that in 2014, the Data Quality Campaign observed that 20 states had passed one or multiple privacy laws concerning students. Time will tell if such protection laws will be as prevalent in the U.S as they are in Europe.
