EFF Says Google Chromebooks Are Still Spying On Students (softpedia.com) 84
schwit1 quotes a report from Softpedia: In the past two years since a formal complaint was made against Google, not much has changed in the way they handle this. Google still hasn't shed its "bad guy" clothes when it comes to the data it collects on underage students. In fact, the Electronic Frontier Foundation says the company continues to massively collect and store information on children without their consent or their parents'. Not even school administrators fully understand the extent of this operation, the EFF says. According to the latest status report from the EFF, Google is still up to no good, trying to eliminate students privacy without their parents notice or consent and "without a real choice to opt out." This, they say, is done via the Chromebooks Google is selling to schools across the United States.
Why are those responsible not in prison? (Score:2)
I mean, either this is illegal and they should be, or this is perfectly legal, then the complaint has no merit. Which one is it?
Re:Why are those responsible not in prison? (Score:5, Insightful)
I suspect the problem is there isn't anything really illegal about it, it's just unethical from the EFF's point of view.
Unfortunately for them, ethics is something subjective and large corporations generally don't have.
All they can do is try and raise outrage on the consumer/government level and hope it's enough to get Google to change.
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That is bound to fail. Outrages are short-term things.
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They are putting personal data like names, photographs on social media. That isn't anything different from having year photographs on school noticeboards and yearbooks.. If they were taking live streamed photographs and recording audio that would be a wiretapping crime.
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They are putting personal data like names, photographs on social media. That isn't anything different from having year photographs on school noticeboards and yearbooks.. If they were taking live streamed photographs and recording audio that would be a wiretapping crime.
Except parents explicitly opt in to allow the photographs to be taken and sign a release for their use. If parents do not sign the release photos are not take. I know of parents with special ed kids who do not allow them to be photographed and the school complies with those wishes. At a minimum, the school is misrepresenting themselves as the student to establish the accounts, which probably violate TOS if not any laws. If enough parents complain to the school board and the head of the local school district
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No, one is supposed to have laws against this sort of thing. Unless the law has reverted completely to a tool for oppression (the US seems to be fast approaching that state), laws are there to protect citizens against corporations too.
False dichotomy (Score:2)
I mean, either this is illegal and they should be, or this is perfectly legal, then the complaint has no merit. Which one is it?
Does this have to be limited to only the two possibilities you suggest? Here are three more
* legal, but annoying
* legal, but unethical
* legal, but because case law has not been found that applies to it yet. That is, it's untested
Potential to be quite the powerful lawsuit! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Potential to be quite the powerful lawsuit! (Score:4, Insightful)
There is also the matter of what is done with the information. Is Google seeking to manipulate the choices of children regardless of the psychological harm that causes those children. Peer pressure is the marketing tool of choice, using peer pressure damages children, those who stigmatise others and the victims of that psychological attack, the penalty applied to children for the parents failure to buy the products demanded by adults with degree in marketing and psychological. That would be child abuse upon a mass scale. Even in parents consent to the information being gathered, I strongly doubt they would accept psychologically trained professional adults manipulating children to feed the greed of those adults, with total disregard to the psychological impact upon those children the Goolge's trained professionals are preying upon. Not them alone of course, M$ and now even the ISPs are also looking to psychological prey upon and manipulate children.
Time for a complete ban on collecting information about minors and targeting them with marketing, a complete across the board ban.
Re:Potential to be quite the powerful lawsuit! (Score:5, Insightful)
Time for a complete ban on collecting information about minors and targeting them with marketing, a complete across the board ban.
How about it's time for a complete ban on collecting information about anyone without consent. Make it opt-in. If targeted ads are better and really lead to "an enriched and engaging experience that customers will enjoy interacting with", as all privacy-averse marketing drones claim, then people will opt-in en masse in order not to be stuck with the boring old untargeted ads.
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You go to the corner store every Saturday to buy gum. The cashier knows you (and your purchase history) and tells you about a new gum that came out. He just violated your ban.
While I agree such a ban would be unworkable, in the case you described I would think there was an implied consent to collect the information you provided based on the purchase.
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But I am sure some legal eagl
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actually for Olde School Customer service its REQUIRED to remember your most common customers. heck there were times when i saw a new item come in and immediately thought of a customer that would want it.
Patrick Jayne (the mentalist) would be EPIC in customer service.
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Look at Android (Score:5, Insightful)
Take a look at Android, it's a very scammy surveillance OS.
1. Your location is transmitted to Google, together with surrounding wifi settings. They do this with a popup that appears whenever you turn on GPS, it asks you if you want to improve location accuracy, in actuality it's tracking the surrounding wifi spots and matching them against the GPS location your phone records. The dialog is written so you think you need to say yes to get GPS to work, but you can say no and GPS still works.
It always appears, all the time, until you say yes, and then it doesn't popup again, quietly tracking your location and watching your nearby wifi hotspots.
You cannot say 'no, never' the dialog will keep pestering.
2. Google Play Store, if you try to disable or remove this, it will remove every app you installed from the playstore at the same time. Google play store provides Google with your credit card linkage, and real id, to the location and search surveillance it does.
3. You cannot remove the required google account and keep the apps you installed.
4. Android now INSISTS on a telephone number for Android device registrations.
5. Google changes the privacy terms frequently, it popups says "action required" and if you refuse to say yes to whatever privacy invasion they've introduced, the alternate options are to delete your Google account (and uninstall every app you installed, see 2). This is false, you can simply ignore the demand to accept the change of terms.
6. Did you agree to backup the phone? That pester message that pops up regularly that you can't tell "no never' to? You just gave Google the password to every wifi network and business server you ever used. Compromising a lot of data.
They present a set of information in a privacy dashboard that is a tiny subset of the information they actually record. All pages visited with Google stats and Google adverts, and Google content served are also known to them and recorded by them. Your Youtube viewing is recorded even when logged out using browser profile id. Same with Google search, it persters you to login, but if you don't they still record the searches you make against the browser id to cross link for when you eventually do login.
Really, Duckduckgo for search and avoid them like the plague and they'll still have a mass of tracking information on you. You cannot opt out of this, they present it as the price for having an Android device.
Google are surveillance-ware shit.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Rooting, clean room, no GAPPS.
Use alternative app stores.
Use global ad blocking.
Never Google anything.
That's my suggestion to the problems you pointed out. It has it's drawbacks..
Competition isn't any better (Score:4, Informative)
You can thank Apple and the government for that. Apple did (does?) exactly this to develop their initial WiFi map data. They rolled out an update which collected location and nearby WiFi SSID data from people's iPhones [f-secure.com] and uploaded it to Apple, and buried the fact that they were doing it in the iTunes installation process. Once they got this data by using every iPhone owner as an unpaid hotspot locator, they dumped the Skyhook WiFi map they had been licensing.
Google developed their WiFi map by adding WiFi SSID sniffers to the cars they were driving around the world to take Street View pictures for Google Maps. Someone at the EU claimed they were recording more than just SSID. Google said that was ridiculous, self-audited their collection software, found a developer's setting hadn't been turned off and that they had beent collecting more than just SSID, and self-reported themselves to the EU. The EU and US governments promptly sued and fined them for it. Apple OTOH got off scott free. So Google stopped collecting the WiFi SSID location data collection themselves, and just copied what Apple was doing - lifting the data straight from people's phones.
So maybe they should be like Apple and make it impossible to remove the Play Store?
At least they give you the option to not use the Google Play Store if you don't want to use it. You can use an alternate store like Amazon. Or if you're really paranoid you can just sideload everything directly from your PC. Good luck doing that with the competitors.
Well duh. Without the Google account, the apps have no way of knowing if they were installed after being legitimately purchased, or if they were pirated. The Achilles heel of online software distribution is confirmation of licensing. Either Google does it, with the side-effect that removing the Google account disables the apps. Or every app developer out there including the one-person shops has to run, operate, and maintain their own licensing server 24/7/365.
? My Android tablet didn't. You sure this isn't something the cellular carriers have added to Android phones?
Everyone does this. Google is the only one who lets you see what they've collected on you [google.com], and gives you the option to delete it if you wish.
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1. Simply turn GPS off except when needed.
2. Since when? I run ICS at have disabled the Play Store because an update to Play Services a few months ago began eating 100% CPU, however in the process of isolating this I uninstalled and disabled multiple things including Play Store without issue (other than no app updates, or easy way to install apps without reenabling the store).
5. Never seen any such thing.
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True. It does have a lot of ops-in.
Get used to it (Score:1, Insightful)
We live in the Surveillance Age now. For better or worse we must expect each and every action we make to be recorded and watched. We must expect each and every word to say to be recorded and listened to. We must expect our existence to be constantly observed and analyzed. This will not stop. Ever. There is no way out. Anyone trying to avoid surveillance is automatically marked a "person of interest". You don't want to be on a blacklist, do you? Gotta work to eat.
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This guy is on to us. GET HIM BOYS!
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It completely takes the piss when you try and use Visual Studio 2017 IDE, and discover that you have to have an account with Azurre and login before you can actually use the editor or compiler. Even with VMware, the manager connects with their remote server.
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MP3 (Score:1)
Meanwhile, Google has blocked mp3 search. Go ahead, type filetype:mp3 anything and see for yourself.
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Meanwhile, Google has blocked mp3 search. Go ahead, type filetype:mp3 anything and see for yourself.
That is because it would lead you off of google properties, go to youtube and search for ANY song, you'll find it.
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Choice to opt out (Score:2)
Don't use Chromebooks. It's as though it's the only option, and it isn't.
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This is a nice reminder of who and what the REAL threat is. Windows 10 data collection is not the problem. Microsoft doesn't define it's existence on profiling and targeting people, but Google does.
Microsoft doesn't do it because they can't make a cell phone that people want to buy, to save their lives.
It's not like they haven't tried, many times, including buying most of a company that was capable of making cell phones, only to have the parts drift through their fingers, like sand at a beach.
Microsoft would definitely do it if they could work it out, or buy a company that doesn't dissolve as a result of being bought by them.
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Microsoft makes their money in commercial software and services all other experiments notwithstanding. Google make some money advertising to people and building profiles and people to better Target than advertising all the other experiments notwithstanding. Can you see the difference?
Not really, no. Sorry.
Microsoft makes really complete profiles on individual persons.
Google makes really complete profiles in aggregate for demographic markets.
Microsoft makes business decisions based on profile data telling them how many people they can reach with a given product.
Google makes business decisions based on profile data telling them the size of each demographic their advertiser can reach with their product.
Microsoft makes a lot of products that fail, when they try to do something new.
Google m
It's not spying (Score:2)
It is a one-way business relationship in which Alphabet monetizes user data and gets the money, and the people who purchase Chromebooks or use Chrome browser, get the business.
Micro$oft's version of cloud laptop will be no dif (Score:2)
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Errrm, yes. ... And? They're friggin' CHROMEBOOKS! (Score:2)
They run Chrome OS. Basically an extension of Google into your lap. Like android phones are a extension of Google into your hands and pockets.
Complaining that Google is observing it's users is like complaining that water is wet. Observing users is Googles freakin business model, that's what they earn money with. That's why you get all the neat stuff including cloud storage basically for free. This is also the reason Google is not another MS or Apple. They are a different league. They don't care what your de
Google accounts are used (Score:3)
And the Schools keep buying these things. (Score:2)
I Love the EFF, but (Score:1)
Google security is pretty good (Score:1)
I trust Google more than Apple or Microsoft. No majors hacks...yet.
Did anyone read the status report? (Score:2)
I just read the EFF status report [eff.org] linked from TFA and the summary. I'm usually a big fan of the EFF and what they do, but this status report seems completely devoid of actual privacy violations.
Section 1 (which is most of the status report) is "survey results". They sent out a survey saying "do you completely understand you child's school's privacy policy", and unsurprisingly almost nobody does. Which is a problem, but not a privacy problem. If you asked most people "do you completely understand all of
Schools are at fault, not Google (Score:1)
The real problem is the school administrators loading all of the student's personal information into the devices, using poor privacy and security practices, not taking the time to understand what they were doing with the Chromebooks, and then blaming Google. Read the article. Here's a quote that sticks out:
"schools had mass-enrolled their kids into Google email accounts, using their full names. Furthermore, they posted photos of them on social media sites and enrolled them into other services that colle