4 ms·

I don't think it's asking much for Google to put a wall around the profiles and associated usage data for these school related accounts.

arebop 11y ago
As I said, I think reasonable people can disagree about it, but I think they are demanding that the wall have a shape like "this data will be displayed back to you while you work on it and to your teacher during the grading period and otherwise it will not be used," whereas many people are totally happy for the wall to be "we will use this data to help you learn and allow your teacher to evaluate your progress." Lots of people object to advertising to kids, not so many people object to building a better word processor or kids-oriented theorem prover or whatever, including ideas that haven't been thought about yet but are (in the developer's honest opinion) wholly motivated by the purpose of education. EFF basically doesn't trust a cloud software company to have any discretion, but I think most people are willing to take an informed risk when they entrust their data to someone else's instructions or computational resources; otherwise they'd write the software themselves and run it on their own device and so forth.
- ryanhuff 11y ago
  Your example seems fine to me. My kids use Google Docs for school, and use it both for collaborating with other students at home, and to submit homework to the teacher. That seems to fall in your example. The risks that you describe also sound reasonable for adults to assume. However, Google, being who/what they are (organizing the world's information), shouldn't be surprised when "watchdogs" ask more of them, particularly in this case. They deliberately entered this education space. It's not just about plain advertising (to me). Whatever profiles are built from children's use of Google's services (that they are required to use through school), should be carved out from their normal data harvestinf and user profile nurturing. It should be up to Google to develop a "win/win"model whereby they can protect students and properly monitor app performance. It doesn't sound too challenging for a company like Google.

arebop 11y ago

As I said, I think reasonable people can disagree about it, but I think they are demanding that the wall have a shape like "this data will be displayed back to you while you work on it and to your teacher during the grading period and otherwise it will not be used," whereas many people are totally happy for the wall to be "we will use this data to help you learn and allow your teacher to evaluate your progress." Lots of people object to advertising to kids, not so many people object to building a better word processor or kids-oriented theorem prover or whatever, including ideas that haven't been thought about yet but are (in the developer's honest opinion) wholly motivated by the purpose of education. EFF basically doesn't trust a cloud software company to have any discretion, but I think most people are willing to take an informed risk when they entrust their data to someone else's instructions or computational resources; otherwise they'd write the software themselves and run it on their own device and so forth.

ryanhuff 11y ago
Your example seems fine to me. My kids use Google Docs for school, and use it both for collaborating with other students at home, and to submit homework to the teacher. That seems to fall in your example. The risks that you describe also sound reasonable for adults to assume. However, Google, being who/what they are (organizing the world's information), shouldn't be surprised when "watchdogs" ask more of them, particularly in this case. They deliberately entered this education space. It's not just about plain advertising (to me). Whatever profiles are built from children's use of Google's services (that they are required to use through school), should be carved out from their normal data harvestinf and user profile nurturing. It should be up to Google to develop a "win/win"model whereby they can protect students and properly monitor app performance. It doesn't sound too challenging for a company like Google.