“Privacy advocates at the Electronic Frontier Foundation have again outlined how Google is successfully dumping millions of low-cost Chromebooks on U.S. schools, enabling the mass collection and storage of information on children without the consent of their parents or even the understanding of many school administrators,” Daniel Eran Dilger writes for AppleInsider.
“Two years after it filed a federal complaint against Google alleging that it was ‘collecting and data mining school children’s personal information, including their Internet searches,’ the EFF has issued a new status report detailing how Google is still working to erase minor students’ privacy “often without their parents notice or consent, and usually without a real choice to opt out,” Dilger writes. “In stark contrast, Apple has emphasized in its education site that it ‘will never track, share, or sell student information for advertising or marketing purposes” and that the “security, privacy, confidentiality and integrity of student information is always protected.’ The site also provides a data and privacy overview for schools and privacy guide for parents.”
“Increasingly, U.S. schools have adopted mandatory polices for grade-school students that assign children Chromebooks and enroll them into cloud services that collect data, without notice and without any alternative options,” Dilger writes. “Parents have reported to the EFF that schools have mass-enrolled their children into Google email accounts using their full names, posted their photos on social media sites and enrolled them into other services that collect data without any notification.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Chromebooks. Google’s trojan horse.
Yet another reminder that there’s no such thing as a free lunch and you get what you pay for.
As we wrote last May: The cream-of-the-crop schools, like the cream-of-the-crop consumers and corporations, deploy Apple Macs and iPads, not cheapo plastic Chromebooks.
Unfortunately, too many U.S. public schools, unionized in the worst possible way, are broken through and through.
As we wrote back in January 2016: There is no easy answer for a company dedicated to quality to compete in a market that’s hellbent on shortsightedly wasting taxpayers’ money on cheap, shitty junk.
Make that “cheap, shitty, privacy-invading, unsafe junk.”
SEE ALSO:
Apple is losing its grip on American classrooms to cheap Chromebooks – March 2, 2017
Apple CEO blasts teacher unions, says US schools are ‘unionized in the worst possible way’ – February 16, 2007
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers “Fred Mertz” and “Nick P.” for the heads up.]