Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Google sued over student data
NM says tech giant used educational products to spy on kids, families
New Mexico’s attorney general has sued Google, saying the tech giant used its educational products to spy on the state’s children and families.
Google collected a trove of students’ personal information, including data on their physical locations, websites they visited, YouTube videos they watched and their voice recordings, Hector Balderas, New Mexico’s attorney general, said in a federal lawsuit filed this month.
Although the company provides school districts with an online dashboard to control student access to YouTube and dozens of other Google apps, some public school officials have said that it can be difficult to parse the tech giant’s differing data-mining practices.
Over the past eight years, Google has emerged as the predominant tech brand in American public schools.
Today, more than half of the nation’s public schools — and 90 million students and teachers globally — use free Google Education apps like Gmail and Google Docs.
The complaint, filed in U.S. District Court for the District of New Mexico, comes five months after Google agreed to pay a $170 million fine to settle federal and state charges that it had illegally harvested the personal data of children on YouTube.
The new lawsuit claimed that Google violated a federal law, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, which requires companies to obtain a parent’s consent before collecting the name, contact information and other personal details from a child under 13.
The lawsuit also said Google deceived schools, parents, teachers and students by telling them that were no privacy concerns with its education products when, in fact, the company had amassed a trove of potentially sensitive details.
Jose Castaneda, a Google spokesman, said the lawsuit’s claims were “factually wrong.”
“G Suite for Education allows schools to control account access and requires that schools obtain parental consent when necessary,” he said. “We do not use personal information from users in primary and secondary schools to target ads.”
For years, parents and privacy groups have complained that Google was using its products to track millions of school children without adequately detailing its data-mining practices or obtaining explicit parental consent for the tracking. One issue of contention is that the company applies different privacy policies to different products.
Google has said that its “core” products for schools, including Gmail and Drive, comply with privacy regulations requiring companies to use student data only for school purposes. The company said those core education products do not collect student data for advertising purposes or show targeted ads.
When students log into their Chromebooks, Google turns on a feature that syncs its Chrome browser with other devices used by a student on that account, the lawsuit said. It effectively blends a student’s school and personal web activities into a single profile that can be viewed by Google, according to the lawsuit.
Students “begin engaging with Google technology through teachers and in school settings for homework, communication and other educational purposes,” Balderas said. Then the same children, he said, go on to use Google services from their phones or at home, “allowing Google to track them for noneducational purposes — and definitely without the consent of their parents.”