New Mexico Says Google Spies on Students

The media company allegedly breached the privacy of students who use free Chromebooks that are delivered to schools through its G Suite for Education program, as claimed by New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas' prosecution.

Including data on the physical location of the students, visited websites, watched YouTube videos and voice recordings, Google collected a massive database of information from the students, which were all mentioned by Balderas in the federal lawsuit.

Google has been charged with deliberately misleading schools and parents in terms of their data policies. According to the law, the company is required to issue a privacy policy to which parents must consent to, thus giving parents the option of verifying and sharing their children's information with third parties.

The lawsuit also claims that Google used this information for publicity purposes, and the company has stored the data on its G Suite for Education services in customized databases for each student. In addition to this, the suit also accuses Google of not adequately divulging the information and failing to give parents the opportunity to view and restrict this data collection.

The lawsuit states that Google has failed to obtain "verifiable parental approval" before collecting the data, a breach of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. Google then responded by calling the statement "factually wrong" without referring to a request to further elaborate.

Overshadowing competitors, such as Apple or Microsoft with a suite of affordable, easy- to use devices, Google has become the leading technology brand in US homes and public schools within the last eight years.

Even though the company offers schools an online portal for monitoring students' access to YouTube and hundreds of other Google applications, representatives from public schools have said that the various data processing activities of the software giant can be difficult to analyze.

The senior litigator in the state attorney general's Consumer and Environmental Protection Division, Brian McMath, mentioned that his office records the use of a certain kind of Google Education program by two-thirds of New Mexico school districts.

Google committed last September to pay a fine of $170 million to sort out federal and state penalties for improperly storing children's personal data on YouTube.

Over a period of time, families and privacy advocates have long complained that, without explaining their data collection activities or seeking parental consent for surveillance, Google uses its education products to track millions of school kids. One of the major arguments is that the company applies various privacy policies to various products.

It's not New Mexico's first encounter in the courts with Google. In 2018, Mr. Balderas filed a separate lawsuit alleging that the federal law on privacy had been infringed by the popular children's app maker, together with advertising outlets such as Google and Twitter. Google vowed not to acquire, retain, use or share personal data of students beyond the educational requirements in order to alleviate fears about the mining of knowledge in Google education.

The most recent case claims that Google has broken those promises.