Missouri Education Watchdog:
While many have questioned Google’s invasion of the classroom and how Google Apps for Education, (now called G-Suite), collects and uses student or teacher information, few have really gotten much in the way of answers. What is reportedly happening with Springfield Missouri Public School’s use of Google Drive offers a rare glimpse into Google’s potential to collect data. School-issued student Google accounts connect to Google Drive which can allow for the ability to Auto-Sync devices to Auto-Save passwords, browsing history and other digital data points from numerous devices used by a single user. For students in SPS this could include digital data from non-school related accounts. This July 17, 2018 Fox 5 KRBK news story explains how one family discovered this practice and reported it to the school district.
Google being Google.
I’ve said this before, and it remains true:
Google offers very cheap hardware and software to the education market. In order to save money on taxes, Americans have chosen to serve up their children, by the millions, to a company which views them, not as customers to serve, but products to sell.
Underfunded school districts can’t afford to care about privacy. All they see are cheap computers that can teach their students clerical skills for a diminishing service economy.
After reading the source article, I don’t think they got it right.
Google Apps for Education are tied to a student Gmail address. So if a parent sees their information on a student’s device, it’s 99.9% likely that’s because the parent has also logged in to the device with a personal Gmail account, in which case, with auto-sync enabled on the parent account, their passwords would appear on the student laptop.
I say this because even in the source article where it explains how to find out if your (your = parent) passwords are on the school device, they say step 1 is to log in to your account on the student device. In that case, of course your data will be there if you set your account to sync on any device.
Should there be more awareness made of what the sync settings actually do? Absolutely. And should school IT administrators control the sync settings – sure, and they can. In this case, it sounds like they aren’t. So with all due respect, I don’t see this as “Google being Google.” I see this as a school’s IT department not understanding how to control and manage the sync feature. It would be the same on any platform that had / has this capability.
Yeah, we use GSuite here at CorporateJob, and their policy setting on the GSuite account they control turned off most of the sync stuff.
“School bad at IT” isn’t as useful a headline, though.
And Americans have chosen to accept that.
My wife and I very deliberately decided (before we were married — good idea to decide that, young’uns!) that we didn’t want kids.
I believe that:
1. I would never agree to this kind of thing if it were my child, and
2. I’ll pay higher taxes for public education (Ideally, I’d like cuts elsewhere — $700 billion in military for example). Even though I don’t have kids and will receive no direct benefit.
I’ve got 13 nieces and nephews — not all American. I don’t ever want them to be “products.”
In the news video, they listed iPads at one point, so I must assume that this isn’t just the usual weak Android security/privacy narrative. So, if iPads are included, how can Google Drive access passwords guarded with Apple’s Secure Enclave? How would Google Drive access the files in other apps’ sandboxes?
I see three possibilities:
1. Google Drive is hacking iOS.
2. Apple is giving the data to Google Drive.
3. This article/story is wrong. Norman and Diane are confused about how their data ended up on their daughter’s school device.
Only one of those seems likely. The other two range from “yeah, right” to “no way in hell”.
Sorry Jim, this article is fear-mongering.
I’m going with option 3: “Norman and Diane are confused about how their data ended up on their daughter’s school device.” See my comment above on how this very likely happened.