EFF Files Complaint Against Google For Invading Student Privacy

(RTTNews) - The Electronic Frontier Foundation or EFF has filed a complaint against Google Inc, accusing the company of deceptively collecting and data mining personal information about school children, despite signing a pledge not to do so.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group, in its complaint with the Federal Trade Commission alleged that Google is collecting personal information about school children, including their Internet searches.

The EFF said it uncovered the practice while researching its "Spying on Students" campaign that was launched on Wednesday. The campaign was created by the EFF to raise awareness about the privacy risks of school-supplied electronic devices and software.

The EFF examined Google's Chromebook and Google Apps for Education or GAFE, a suite of educational cloud-based software programs used in many schools across the country by students as young as seven years old.

While Google does not use student data for targeted advertising within a subset of Google sites, Google's "Sync" feature for the Chrome browser is enabled by default on Chromebooks that are sold to schools.

The feature enables Google to track, store on its servers and data mine for non-advertising purposes the records of all Internet sites visited by the students.

Google can also track every search term used by the students, the results they click on, videos they watch on YouTube, and their saved passwords.

The EFF noted that Google's practices are in sharp contrast to the Student Privacy Pledge signed by it, under which companies have promised not to collect, use or share students' personal information except when needed for legitimate educational purposes or if parents provide permission.

According to the EFF, Google has said it will soon disable a setting on school Chromebooks that allows Chrome Sync data, such as browsing history, to be shared with other Google services.

But the digital rights agency says it is not enough to correct the violations of the Student Privacy Pledge.