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Cats gotta be out of the bag long by now. Am I to believe Google classroom isn't storing my students information, from as young as 3rd grade, to sell to 3rd pa

Cats gotta be out of the bag long by now. Am I to believe Google classroom isn't storing my students information, from as young as 3rd grade, to sell to 3rd parties once they turn 18? Or am I naive to think they aren't already selling it while they are literally children?

nvarsj 2y ago
Most kids just stay logged as as their google classroom email, so that includes search/youtube/etc. Of course Google is tracking all that usage and targeting them for ads.
- hnpolicestate 2y ago
  By the time they turn 18, Google will have such a perfect model of who they are. Will sell to the CIA, FBI etc. Complete profiles of how citizens think. Really evil stuff.
  - nox101 2y ago
    this is a lie and you feel ashamed and stop spreading it. Google doesn't sell profles period and doesn't sell data to the fbi/cia The only evil here is you spreading false info
    - hnpolicestate 2y ago
      You are either being dishonest or are just ignorant. User data is disclosed to advertisers when they auction for ad placement. Many of those advertisers then sell the user data they collect through the auction, whether or not they win the auction, to other parties. It's a virtual certainty the FBI, CIA, NSA etc purchase that information. Your argument is basically Google didn't do anything wrong because they are not the direct point of sale. But they aren't fools. They know what happens to the data they disclose to advertisers. It's repackaged and sold again.
      - nox101 2y ago
        User data is not disclosed to adveritsers. Please produce the documentation where I can purchase user data. All I can do is ask google to target people. I can not get info on those people from Google.
        ghostpepper 2y ago
        The police don't buy it, they get it for free https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/19/google-geofence-warrants/ https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/19/google-geofence-warrants/
        hnpolicestate 2y ago
        I'm going by this document from the Irish Council for Civil Liberties and a lawsuit brought against Google, signed by member of Congress, that alleged data brokers are "siphoning" off bid-stream data and reselling it . It makes the claim that U.S Dept of Homeland Security uses real-time bidding data for warrant-less phone tracking. https://www.iccl.ie/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Mass-data-breach-of-Europe-and-US-data-1.pdf?utm_source=simpleanalytics.com https://www.iccl.ie/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Mass-data-bre... https://www.tampabay.com/news/2021/05/07/google-selling-users-personal-data-despite-promise-federal-court-lawsuit-claims/ https://www.tampabay.com/news/2021/05/07/google-selling-user... I get the desire for a smoking gun. Maybe one exists and someone else interested in the subject could share it. But at some point, people make judgement calls based off of the information made public. I would bet my original assertion is true, and that Google data is somehow being sold to the federal government, to build dossiers on it's citizens. Same with E.U. citizens.
    - tylerchilds 2y ago
      i wouldn’t claim sale, but was prism a lie?
    - tehwebguy 2y ago
      Well, we all know about Prism, the Google law enforcement portal, subpoenas and national security letters. Do those four not cover their description?
      - UncleMeat 2y ago
        "Google turns over data when served a warrant" and "Google sells data to the government for profit" are very different things.
    - gitaarik 2y ago
      And why is your claim not a lie? How are you so sure they aren't doing that?
    - gitaarik 2y ago
      The FBI / CIA is known for demanding big tech companies for information about citizens. They obviously also do that, and largely probably, at Google. So actually it's not selling, they just demand it, and Google gives it.
- Barrin92 2y ago
  For what it's worth since the DMA went into effect in Europe, you can now turn off sharing between almost all Google services. https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/14202892 https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/14202892
SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
Tracking isn't the kind of thing where once you cross some threshold there's no point in caring. Even if your kid's schoolwork habits are all bundled and sold to advertisers, protecting their privacy in other areas remains just as valuable.
- hnpolicestate 2y ago
  Sarcasm? "Even if your kids schoolwork habits are all bundled and sold to advertisers". I think by that point we have done such a shameful job of protecting the privacy of children that we should put our heads down and throw in the towel. Not to mention all that data being fed into Gemini, profited off of. No point in protecting whatever private crumbs remain. Requires a full social reset. Imo.
  - SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
    What is a "full social reset"? Ideally I'd prefer to make incremental progress on privacy, but if you pinned me down and made me choose between accepting the status quo and abolishing all networked education apps, I'd pick the status quo. They have real benefits and I wish they'd been around when I was a kid.
ssss11 2y ago
That’s my biggest concern. Schools have no idea.
- scrapcode 2y ago
  Certainly not siding with Big G here, but the onus is on the school. They should be able to be held accountable.
- lolinder 2y ago
  I've worked in the education sector—at least in the US there are well known data protection laws that schools very much do know about and attempt to comply with. It's not quite HIPAA levels of serious, but they do take it seriously, and as another commenter notes Google actually does comply.
  - damontal 2y ago
    I remember a teacher telling us that parents should not check their kids Google classroom accounts because it would be a violation of the other students’ privacy. I understand what they were saying but there’s no way I’m not checking my kid’s Google classroom account. Ridiculous.
    - mnky9800n 2y ago
      I was offered a job by a large ed tech company that has all sorts of data including parent teacher communications, grades, hourly attendance, etc. For millions of students enrolled in k12 programs in the USA. I initially accepted but then they wanted me to build an early warning system to predict whether a student would have a behavioural problem on the next day. I quit because I do not find it moral to build panopticons for children. But I'm sure they found someone to replace me.
      - ryandrake 2y ago
        Good job. I’ve quit a job similarly over ethical issues. But this is the problem with software engineering lacking an ethical standard: there’s always Bob, three desks down, who is willing to build the Torment Nexus. One person’s ethical stand is meaningless.
advisedwang 2y ago
If your student has a google account created by the school using Google for Education, then their data is not being used for ads. And if their admins delete your student account after they graduate (as they should) then their data is truly gone (after a relatively short retention period). Now if you have a student using a non Google for Education account, then Google will store and use their data for ad targeting after they turn 18. Also if they lie about their age when they create their account (which is very likely, especially because Google doesn't allow you to create an account with age less than 13) then this will kick in sooner. In addition even though ad personalization is off for under 18 and advertisers are not supposed to target them by other means, they can and do by targetting search terms, youtube categories etc that under 18s are frequently interested in. (FWIW Google never really "sells" your data. That would loose their monopoly on their most valued asset. It's more like they rent it out, but allowing advertisers to target you. The advertisers never actually get to see "person X has attribute ABC", more like the advertiser says "target people with ABC" and they trust google to show it people like that.)
- hnpolicestate 2y ago
  "If your student has a google account created by the school using Google for Education, then their data is not being used for ads" - then how do they make money? Is Google classroom free for schools?
  - lolinder 2y ago
    Yes, but there are enterprise-y tiers that are paid.
  - Loughla 2y ago
    Yes it's free. And yes it's not making money. They do have phenomenal education resources for teachers that are paid, though. It's about getting them baked into the google ecosystem. Microsoft did this in the 90's, but with businesses instead of schools (and not for free to be honest). Get them used to Google so they use nothing but Google when they're adults. Then monetization happens.
tzs 2y ago
I'm no longer convinced the Google actually stores very much personal information. A few months ago when they started cracking down on ad blockers I started watching YouTube without one to see if it was tolerable. That test is ongoing. In all that time the only ads that were not completely worthless to me have been: 1. An ad for a countertop food composting machine. I have no interest in buying such a machine, but I hadn't even known they existed and that was interesting enough to get me to go the seller's site for more information. 2. A few ads for products or services that I already use and already intended to continue using. 3. Ads for Verizon Visible which were completely worthless to me at the time, but a couple months later I was looking for a new carrier because I was about to upgrade from an Apple Watch 4 without cellular to an Apple Watch 10 with cellular and my carrier, T-Mobile Connect, did not support Apple Watch. I ended up picking Visible and there is a chance that seeing those ads made that more likely. If they knew anywhere near as much about me as people think they do they should be able to do a much better job with the ads.
- ramraj07 2y ago
  They have a metric ton of data about you. I think they just don’t use it much because they probably realized that unless you get super creepy about it, most of this data is worthless from an advertising point of view. Except on YouTube they don’t really know what you actually like - most of us don’t tend to express our real desires in the web but only in instagram or TikTok or YouTube. YT has ads but it doesn’t seem to have devolved into a cesspool of content only designed to sell you things as Insta and others have become. Your location could be useful but it becomes creepy if google used that to target you with ads so it seems to have bowed out of it (they don’t even seem to store location history in their servers anymore). Clearly they’re happy with the money they make from AdWords and andsense. So they’re leaving us alone with the rest of the data for now.
  - mnky9800n 2y ago
    It could be that the wow factor of ai/ml/data/whatever came about because of these examples like Zappos increasing sales 1% because of changing the colour of the website or Netflix making better recommendations and ever since then that has kind of set the expectation. Both of those were great examples of what to do with data and algorithms but there's a catch, neither is really tailored to the individual in a way that it will consistently work over time. Netflix recommendations work because you will eventually pick something to watch and they increase the likelihood that you like what you pick. It works the other way too , knowing what people like helps them decide what new shows to make. But the only way they know this is that your profile matches a set of profiles. And this aggregate way of doing things will always have too much variance to be able to consistently be applied to an individual because different people are different even when they are similar. This is the ultimate conclusion that foundation model people have come to, at least implicitly, as they hope that by putting all data available such as the entire internet they will arrive at a combination of things that will consistently meet everyone's needs on demand whatever they may be. But the complexity of life is still higher than that and people are quick to notice when things are being averaged and then served to them.

nvarsj 2y ago

Most kids just stay logged as as their google classroom email, so that includes search/youtube/etc. Of course Google is tracking all that usage and targeting them for ads.

hnpolicestate 2y ago
By the time they turn 18, Google will have such a perfect model of who they are. Will sell to the CIA, FBI etc. Complete profiles of how citizens think. Really evil stuff.
- nox101 2y ago
  this is a lie and you feel ashamed and stop spreading it. Google doesn't sell profles period and doesn't sell data to the fbi/cia The only evil here is you spreading false info
  - hnpolicestate 2y ago
    You are either being dishonest or are just ignorant. User data is disclosed to advertisers when they auction for ad placement. Many of those advertisers then sell the user data they collect through the auction, whether or not they win the auction, to other parties. It's a virtual certainty the FBI, CIA, NSA etc purchase that information. Your argument is basically Google didn't do anything wrong because they are not the direct point of sale. But they aren't fools. They know what happens to the data they disclose to advertisers. It's repackaged and sold again.
    - nox101 2y ago
      User data is not disclosed to adveritsers. Please produce the documentation where I can purchase user data. All I can do is ask google to target people. I can not get info on those people from Google.
      - ghostpepper 2y ago
        The police don't buy it, they get it for free https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/19/google-geofence-warrants/ https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/19/google-geofence-warrants/
      - hnpolicestate 2y ago
        I'm going by this document from the Irish Council for Civil Liberties and a lawsuit brought against Google, signed by member of Congress, that alleged data brokers are "siphoning" off bid-stream data and reselling it . It makes the claim that U.S Dept of Homeland Security uses real-time bidding data for warrant-less phone tracking. https://www.iccl.ie/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Mass-data-breach-of-Europe-and-US-data-1.pdf?utm_source=simpleanalytics.com https://www.iccl.ie/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Mass-data-bre... https://www.tampabay.com/news/2021/05/07/google-selling-users-personal-data-despite-promise-federal-court-lawsuit-claims/ https://www.tampabay.com/news/2021/05/07/google-selling-user... I get the desire for a smoking gun. Maybe one exists and someone else interested in the subject could share it. But at some point, people make judgement calls based off of the information made public. I would bet my original assertion is true, and that Google data is somehow being sold to the federal government, to build dossiers on it's citizens. Same with E.U. citizens.
  - tylerchilds 2y ago
    i wouldn’t claim sale, but was prism a lie?
  - tehwebguy 2y ago
    Well, we all know about Prism, the Google law enforcement portal, subpoenas and national security letters. Do those four not cover their description?
    - UncleMeat 2y ago
      "Google turns over data when served a warrant" and "Google sells data to the government for profit" are very different things.
  - gitaarik 2y ago
    And why is your claim not a lie? How are you so sure they aren't doing that?
  - gitaarik 2y ago
    The FBI / CIA is known for demanding big tech companies for information about citizens. They obviously also do that, and largely probably, at Google. So actually it's not selling, they just demand it, and Google gives it.
Barrin92 2y ago
For what it's worth since the DMA went into effect in Europe, you can now turn off sharing between almost all Google services. https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/14202892 https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/14202892

SpicyLemonZest 2y ago

Tracking isn't the kind of thing where once you cross some threshold there's no point in caring. Even if your kid's schoolwork habits are all bundled and sold to advertisers, protecting their privacy in other areas remains just as valuable.

hnpolicestate 2y ago
Sarcasm? "Even if your kids schoolwork habits are all bundled and sold to advertisers". I think by that point we have done such a shameful job of protecting the privacy of children that we should put our heads down and throw in the towel. Not to mention all that data being fed into Gemini, profited off of. No point in protecting whatever private crumbs remain. Requires a full social reset. Imo.
- SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
  What is a "full social reset"? Ideally I'd prefer to make incremental progress on privacy, but if you pinned me down and made me choose between accepting the status quo and abolishing all networked education apps, I'd pick the status quo. They have real benefits and I wish they'd been around when I was a kid.

ssss11 2y ago

That’s my biggest concern. Schools have no idea.

scrapcode 2y ago
Certainly not siding with Big G here, but the onus is on the school. They should be able to be held accountable.
lolinder 2y ago
I've worked in the education sector—at least in the US there are well known data protection laws that schools very much do know about and attempt to comply with. It's not quite HIPAA levels of serious, but they do take it seriously, and as another commenter notes Google actually does comply.
- damontal 2y ago
  I remember a teacher telling us that parents should not check their kids Google classroom accounts because it would be a violation of the other students’ privacy. I understand what they were saying but there’s no way I’m not checking my kid’s Google classroom account. Ridiculous.
  - mnky9800n 2y ago
    I was offered a job by a large ed tech company that has all sorts of data including parent teacher communications, grades, hourly attendance, etc. For millions of students enrolled in k12 programs in the USA. I initially accepted but then they wanted me to build an early warning system to predict whether a student would have a behavioural problem on the next day. I quit because I do not find it moral to build panopticons for children. But I'm sure they found someone to replace me.
    - ryandrake 2y ago
      Good job. I’ve quit a job similarly over ethical issues. But this is the problem with software engineering lacking an ethical standard: there’s always Bob, three desks down, who is willing to build the Torment Nexus. One person’s ethical stand is meaningless.

advisedwang 2y ago

If your student has a google account created by the school using Google for Education, then their data is not being used for ads. And if their admins delete your student account after they graduate (as they should) then their data is truly gone (after a relatively short retention period). Now if you have a student using a non Google for Education account, then Google will store and use their data for ad targeting after they turn 18. Also if they lie about their age when they create their account (which is very likely, especially because Google doesn't allow you to create an account with age less than 13) then this will kick in sooner. In addition even though ad personalization is off for under 18 and advertisers are not supposed to target them by other means, they can and do by targetting search terms, youtube categories etc that under 18s are frequently interested in. (FWIW Google never really "sells" your data. That would loose their monopoly on their most valued asset. It's more like they rent it out, but allowing advertisers to target you. The advertisers never actually get to see "person X has attribute ABC", more like the advertiser says "target people with ABC" and they trust google to show it people like that.)

hnpolicestate 2y ago
"If your student has a google account created by the school using Google for Education, then their data is not being used for ads" - then how do they make money? Is Google classroom free for schools?
- lolinder 2y ago
  Yes, but there are enterprise-y tiers that are paid.
- Loughla 2y ago
  Yes it's free. And yes it's not making money. They do have phenomenal education resources for teachers that are paid, though. It's about getting them baked into the google ecosystem. Microsoft did this in the 90's, but with businesses instead of schools (and not for free to be honest). Get them used to Google so they use nothing but Google when they're adults. Then monetization happens.

tzs 2y ago

I'm no longer convinced the Google actually stores very much personal information. A few months ago when they started cracking down on ad blockers I started watching YouTube without one to see if it was tolerable. That test is ongoing. In all that time the only ads that were not completely worthless to me have been: 1. An ad for a countertop food composting machine. I have no interest in buying such a machine, but I hadn't even known they existed and that was interesting enough to get me to go the seller's site for more information. 2. A few ads for products or services that I already use and already intended to continue using. 3. Ads for Verizon Visible which were completely worthless to me at the time, but a couple months later I was looking for a new carrier because I was about to upgrade from an Apple Watch 4 without cellular to an Apple Watch 10 with cellular and my carrier, T-Mobile Connect, did not support Apple Watch. I ended up picking Visible and there is a chance that seeing those ads made that more likely. If they knew anywhere near as much about me as people think they do they should be able to do a much better job with the ads.

ramraj07 2y ago
They have a metric ton of data about you. I think they just don’t use it much because they probably realized that unless you get super creepy about it, most of this data is worthless from an advertising point of view. Except on YouTube they don’t really know what you actually like - most of us don’t tend to express our real desires in the web but only in instagram or TikTok or YouTube. YT has ads but it doesn’t seem to have devolved into a cesspool of content only designed to sell you things as Insta and others have become. Your location could be useful but it becomes creepy if google used that to target you with ads so it seems to have bowed out of it (they don’t even seem to store location history in their servers anymore). Clearly they’re happy with the money they make from AdWords and andsense. So they’re leaving us alone with the rest of the data for now.
- mnky9800n 2y ago
  It could be that the wow factor of ai/ml/data/whatever came about because of these examples like Zappos increasing sales 1% because of changing the colour of the website or Netflix making better recommendations and ever since then that has kind of set the expectation. Both of those were great examples of what to do with data and algorithms but there's a catch, neither is really tailored to the individual in a way that it will consistently work over time. Netflix recommendations work because you will eventually pick something to watch and they increase the likelihood that you like what you pick. It works the other way too , knowing what people like helps them decide what new shows to make. But the only way they know this is that your profile matches a set of profiles. And this aggregate way of doing things will always have too much variance to be able to consistently be applied to an individual because different people are different even when they are similar. This is the ultimate conclusion that foundation model people have come to, at least implicitly, as they hope that by putting all data available such as the entire internet they will arrive at a combination of things that will consistently meet everyone's needs on demand whatever they may be. But the complexity of life is still higher than that and people are quick to notice when things are being averaged and then served to them.