Google is secretly using its education products, including those used in many Bay Area schools, to identify students individually, track their online activity including sites they visit and links they click, and “steal” their personal data for profit, a lawsuit filed by California parents and others claims.
According to the lawsuit filed Monday in San Francisco U.S. District Court, almost 70% of U.S. schools use Google’s “Workspace for Education” products in classrooms, and a review by this news organization shows numerous Bay Area school districts — including Berryessa Union, Berkeley Unified, and Pleasanton Unified — use the software.
Google embeds hidden “tracking” technologies to follow students’ online activity across the internet as they use websites and apps, creating a “fingerprint” specific to each child, the lawsuit alleged.
The lawsuit claims Google harms children by violating their privacy, making their personal data vulnerable to cyber-criminals, “failing to compensate them” for their data, preventing them and their parents from knowing what data it collects and who can access it, and “train(ing) children not to value their own and others’ privacy and autonomy.”
Google is accused of violating federal wiretapping law and California privacy law, and the plaintiffs are seeking unspecified damages and court actions related to Google’s student-data collection.
“This fingerprint thus enables Google and others to identify individual devices and thus individual children,” said the lawsuit, filed by parents of four children in public schools, including two siblings from California, a student from Oregon and one from Arizona.
“Google may track children wherever they go, including in their own homes.”
Google has faced previous claims about grabbing children’s data, including from schools. In 2019, the firm agreed to pay $170 million to settle claims by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission that it illegally harvested personal information from kids using YouTube. In 2020, New Mexico sued Google over data collection from children, including via its school products, and Google in a settlement agreed to pay $3.8 million to set up a privacy and online safety initiative for children in that state.
According to the lawsuit filed this week, Google converts “vast troves” of data from millions of pupils into “intimately detailed” student profiles it uses to market products and services to schools, creating “significant economic value” for the Mountain View digital-advertising titan, the lawsuit claimed.
“The stolen information, including data about children under 13 years of age, far exceeds that which is reasonably necessary for children to participate in any school activity that is facilitated by Google’s products,” the lawsuit alleged. “Students are not able to opt out of using Google’s products as part of their education.”
Google has built a company valued at nearly $2 trillion by using data it collects from users of its products to sell targeted advertising. The lawsuit alleged that Google uses students’ data to create, improve and market products it sells to schools, school districts and other customers.
Google in a Wednesday statement acknowledged it gathers data from its education products, but called the lawsuit’s allegations false.
“None of the information collected in Workspace for Education services is ever used for targeted advertising and we have strong controls to protect student data and require schools to obtain parental consent when needed,” Google said.
The Berryessa, Berkeley and Pleasanton school districts did not respond to the allegations in the lawsuit, which did not mention any schools or districts by name.
Children’s use of core products of Workspace for Education such as Gmail, Chat and Gemini generative AI allow Google to collect their names, locations, email addresses, what they have viewed online, people they have communicated with and content they have created, the lawsuit alleged.
Other core products generating data include Google’s Assignments, used by teachers to distribute, collect and grade students’ work; Groups for teamwork; Drive cloud storage; Docs for creating and editing documents; and work-management tool Tasks, the lawsuit said.
The lawsuit claimed Google uses kids’ “stolen information” to create products “that purport to analyze and predict student performance and behavior,” then markets those products to schools.
Google gives its Workspace for Education Fundamentals suite of products to K-12 public schools for free, and also sells schools other sets of education products.
The company touts the ability of the student data to provide insights into pupils’ grades and scores on assignments and quizzes, as well as their academic engagement, progress and performance, the lawsuit alleged.
“These analytics purport to help teachers and administrators ‘personalize’ a child’s curriculum and learning plan, understand a child’s strengths and weaknesses, identify a student’s individual education goals, formulate plans for reaching those goals, and a host of other predictions and recommendations for purportedly better management of the child,” the lawsuit claimed.
However, the lawsuit alleged, the “datafication of a child” for profit “brings about a social disempowerment that negatively affects the child’s education in the moment of learning and also, therefore, the future of a free and sustainable society.”
The lawsuit alleged that if students use Google products on family devices, the company can harvest data about household members.
“Data purportedly collected about and attributed to a child may actually belong to a family member,” the lawsuit claimed, “skewing the profile that is built about that child in ways that may further harm the child.”
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