Deeplinks Blog posts about Student Privacy
After we filed our complaint with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) about Google's unauthorized collection of personal information from school children using Chromebooks and the company's educational apps, we heard from hundreds of parents around the country concerned about K-12 student privacy. This week, an important voice in Washington joined their growing chorus.
On Wednesday, Senator Al Franken (D-MN) wrote a letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai asking for information about the privacy practices of Google Apps for Education (GAFE). Several of his questions reflect concern over the issues we raised with the FTC. Sen. Franken is the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law.
This year the fight to protect student privacy hit a boiling point with our Spying on Students campaign, an effort to help students, parents, teachers, and school administrators learn more about the privacy issues surrounding school-issued devices and cloud services. We're also working to push vendors like Google to put students and their parents back in control of students’ private information.
Many media reports on (as well as at least one response to) the FTC complaint we submitted yesterday about Google’s violation of the Student Privacy Pledge have focused heavily on one issue—Google’s use of Chrome Sync data for non-educational purposes. This is an important part of our complaint, but we want to clarify that Google has other practices which we are just as concerned about, if not more so.
A Case Study of a California Father Fighting His Daughter’s School District Over Digital Privacy
Katherine W. was seven years old, in the third grade, when her teacher first issued Google Chromebooks to the class.
Katherine’s father, Jeff, was concerned. It wasn’t because he had a problem with technology. In fact, Jeff and his family are technology enthusiasts. “We bought a house in this area primarily because of the school district. And one of the things that excited us about the school was the use of technology,” Jeff explained during a recent interview with EFF.
That enthusiasm waned when the school retired its former laptops and brought in Chromebooks for the students instead, also assigning each third grader a profile in Google Apps for Education, Google’s cloud-based education suite. Chromebooks may have been cheaper, but Jeff feared they might come at the cost of his daughter’s privacy.
Update December 17, 2015: Added an explanation of how to encrypt Chrome Sync data so that students can take advantage of Chrome Sync without sharing their browsing history and other personal information with Google, and pointed out that enabling autofill and password saving is OK if Chrome Sync is disabled or encrypted.
If your child's school issued them a Chromebook, there are some important settings you can chance to improve their privacy.
Be sure to also check out our Guide to Google Account Privacy Settings for Students.
Open the Chromebook’s settings by clicking on your username in the bottom right-hand corner, then clicking “Settings.”
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