Google in Big Trouble for Data-Mining Student E-mails

 I will be writing a thread about what I learned at the Work Session on data privacy yesterday.  Some is good, some not-so-good (with Director Carr asking the best questions).  But I can say that SPS has NOT done enough. 

From Education Week:

As part of a potentially explosive lawsuit making its way through federal court, giant online-services provider Google has acknowledged scanning the contents of millions of email messages sent and received by student users of the company’s Apps for Education tool suite for schools. 

In the suit, the Mountain View, Calif.-based company also faces accusations from plaintiffs that it went further, crossing a “creepy line” by using information gleaned from the scans to build “surreptitious” profiles of Apps for Education users that could be used for such purposes as targeted advertising. 

Gmail is a key feature of Google Apps for Education, which has 30 million users worldwide and is provided by the company for free to thousands of educational institutions in the United States.


“This should draw the attention of the U.S. Department of Education, the Federal Trade Commission, and state legislatures,” said Khaliah Barnes, a lawyer with the Electronic Privacy Information Center, or EPIC, a Washington-based advocacy group. “Student privacy is under attack.”


The questions swirling around Google Apps for Education also have major implications, observers say, for how the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, or FERPA, will be interpreted and enforced in the new era of digital technology and “big data” in schools. 

They note that the Houston School District declined to adopt the Google Apps for Education exactly because of worry over what Google would be doing with data it gets from student use.


“The landscape of what districts are facing is changing at light speed,” Mr. Schad said. “We have to come together as educational entities and say to vendors that certain privacy protections are non-negotiable, and we won’t do business with you until they are in place.”  

How many people are involved?

In California, a total of nine plaintiffs are accusing Google of violating federal and state law. They hope to turn the case into a class action and are seeking financial compensation for millions of Gmail users, as well as better disclosure by Google of its practices.  (Google could not provide a current number of K-12 users in the United States.)

From a Google declaration to students at the University of Alaska:

"The University of Alaska (“UA”) has a “Google Mail FAQs,” which asks, “I hear that Google reads my email. Is this true?” The answer states, “They do not ‘read’ your email per se. For use in targeted advertising on their other sites, if your email is not encrypted, software (not a person) does scan your email and compile keywords for advertising. For example, if the software looks at 100 emails and identifies the word ‘Doritos’ or ‘camping’ 50 times, they will use that data for advertising on their other sites.”

“The fact that Google put this in their declaration means we take it as true,” said Ms. Barnes of the privacy watchdog group EPIC. Google’s sworn court statements reveal that the company has violated student trust by using students’ education records for profit.”

 And again, information could follow a child forever and they might never know.

To illustrate the potential harm of Google’s alleged data-mining practices, Bradley S. Shear, a social-media and digital-privacy lawyer based in Bethesda, Md., posed a hypothetical situation in which a teacher using Google Apps for Education emails a parent with information related to a child’s disability status or mental health. 

If the full range of allegations in the California suit is true, Mr. Shear said, the contents of such an email could be used by Google to build a digital-user profile that might follow that student indefinitely.

This is why I am concerned.  You should be as well.