There's always a reason why it's free - Google sued for collecting data from students via chromebooks

[williamcll]

Not too long ago Google provided 4000 Chromebooks to students in the States for "educational purpose", however it seems like there is much more than just teaching kids.

Quote

Two children from Illinois are suing Google for allegedly collecting biometric data, including face scans, of millions of students through the search giant's software tools for classrooms. The lawsuit, filed Thursday in a federal court in San Jose, California, is seeking class-action status. The children, known only as H.K. and J.C. in the complaint, are suing through their father, Clinton Farwell. Google is using its services to create face templates and "voiceprints" of children, the complaint says, through a program in which the search giant provides school districts across the country with Chromebooks and free access to G Suite for Education apps. Those apps include student versions of Gmail, Calendar and Google Docs. The data collection would likely violate Illinois' Biometric Information Privacy Act, or BIPA, which regulates facial recognition, fingerprinting and other biometric technologies in the state. The practice would also likely run afoul of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA, a federal law that requires sites to get parental consent when collecting personal information from users who are under 13 years old. 

 

"Google has complete control over the data collection, use, and retention practices of the 'G Suite for Education' service, including the biometric data and other personally identifying information collected through the use of the service, and uses this control not only to secretly and unlawfully monitor and profile children, but to do so without the knowledge or consent of those children's parents," the lawsuit says. Google declined to comment. Bloomberg earlier reported news of the lawsuit. The complaint is asking for damages of $1,000 for each member of the class for BIPA violations Google committed "negligently," or $5,000 each for each violation committed "intentionally or recklessly." The lawsuit underscores Google's dominance in American classrooms, which has only grown in recent weeks. Schools are depending more on the tech giant's educational tools as physical classes around the nation are canceled in response to the coronavirus pandemic. As several states enact stay-at-home orders, usage of Google's tools has skyrocketed. Downloads of Google Classroom, which helps teachers manage classes online, have swelled to 50 million, making it the No. 1 education app on Apple's iOS and Google's Android platforms. On Thursday, Google announced a partnership with California Gov. Gavin Newsom to donate 4,000 Chromebooks to students across the state. 

 

Source: https://www.cnet.com/news/two-children-sue-google-for-allegedly-collecting-students-biometric-data/

https://topclassactions.com/lawsuit-settlements/privacy/google-class-action-says-kids-data-collected-from-school-chromebooks

Thoughts: While obviously it is not the first time google infringed privacy rights state wide but I think this is a new low (excluding some other reports from facebook). I guess Google didn't take any hints from COPPA.

[Guest]

Did you also know that water is wet?!

[StDragon]

Well, yes! If you're not paying for the product, you are the product!

[CTR640]

36 minutes ago, StDragon said:

Well, yes! If you're not paying for the product, you are the product!

Actually that seems to be no longer the case. For example the smart doorbell Ring, you pay for it and yet you're still the product.

[williamcll]

1 hour ago, huilun02 said:

This was posted before I think

Pretty sure that was another case.

[Sauron]

Quote

There's always a reason why it's free

Most GNU/Linux distributions don't do this something something corporatism

45 minutes ago, StDragon said:

Well, yes! If you're not paying for the product, you are the product!

See above.

[ARikozuM]

Even if you pay for the product, you're still going to have your organs data harvested. 

 

Non-edit: Meant to strike "organs".

[StDragon]

53 minutes ago, CTR640 said:

Actually that seems to be no longer the case. For example the smart doorbell Ring, you pay for it and yet you're still the product.

So while this is true with Google products such as Nest (they are a data collection and analytics company first and foremost), I'm not sure that's true of Ring...yet!

 

Ring is an Amazon company, so who knows what they do with that video. Will they eventually use AI to analyze when and how often you wear the same clothing only to turn around and custom tailor advertisements for you; like a new pair of pants or dress? Entirely possible. We live in an Orwellian age. 

[ARikozuM]

9 minutes ago, StDragon said:

So while this is true with Google products such as Nest (they are a data collection and analytics company first and foremost), I'm not sure that's true of Ring...yet!

 

Ring is an Amazon company, so who knows what they do with that video. Will they eventually use AI to analyze when and how often you wear the same clothing only to turn around and custom tailor advertisements for you; like a new pair of pants or dress? Entirely possible. We live in an Orwellian age. 

Amazon's Ring has already been shown to take telemetry of whenever someone so much as passes by. I don't have one, but I'd hazard a guess that Amazon would know how many J-List packages I get. 

[StDragon]

20 minutes ago, ARikozuM said:

Amazon's Ring has already been shown to take telemetry of whenever someone so much as passes by.

I have a Ring door bell. The unit is recording 24/7 but only indexes with notification based on movement. For example, if a car break-in was reported, often a portion of that street will be targeted too. But maybe only a few will have left their car door unlocked. So if others on the same street have Ring as well, ostensibly law enforcement could review adjacent cameras to see if other car thefts were attempted too and hopefully get a good mugshot. So yes, I agree almost assuredly there's metric being collected. But, question is, if so, is Amazon being transparent as to the motive and dissemination of said data?

[Master Disaster]

18 hours ago, StDragon said:

So while this is true with Google products such as Nest (they are a data collection and analytics company first and foremost), I'm not sure that's true of Ring...yet!

 

Ring is an Amazon company, so who knows what they do with that video. Will they eventually use AI to analyze when and how often you wear the same clothing only to turn around and custom tailor advertisements for you; like a new pair of pants or dress? Entirely possible. We live in an Orwellian age. 

Ring was demonstrated to keep millisecond accurate logs of everything it sees, any recordings are also viewable by Amazon without customer consent and then theres the even more questionable matter of Amazon providing police with recordings from Ring devices without a warrant.

 

Around a month ago one of Amazons top electrical engineers went on records as saying that as a product Ring is illegal and there's no way he can see for them to change it into a legal one. He said, and I'm paraphrasing here, "Ring should be shut down as soon as its possible to do so".

[Master Disaster]

18 hours ago, StDragon said:

I have a Ring door bell. The unit is recording 24/7 but only indexes with notification based on movement. For example, if a car break-in was reported, often a portion of that street will be targeted too. But maybe only a few will have left their car door unlocked. So if others on the same street have Ring as well, ostensibly law enforcement could review adjacent cameras to see if other car thefts were attempted too and hopefully get a good mugshot. So yes, I agree almost assuredly there's metric being collected. But, question is, if so, is Amazon being transparent as to the motive and dissemination of said data?

My question is why would you question the motives of a corporation looking to fit multiple spy devices in every home they possibly can? At that point the motivation is obvious, protection and quality of life improvements are second to the thing that makes them billions a year, data collection. Just having the data is worth more to them than anything, even if they don't actually use it themselves.

[williamcll]

4 hours ago, huilun02 said:

Should just do this, cover the webcam and pluck out the microphone

 

To every Chromebook handed out by Google

 

And thank Google for the free laptop

Can you replace chromeOS with a regular linux?

[jagdtigger]

21 hours ago, CTR640 said:

Actually that seems to be no longer the case. For example the smart doorbell Ring, you pay for it and yet you're still the product.

Windows.......

[Tech_Dreamer]

[Guest willies leg]

Google grows every day. So does Apple and Facebook.

So much data. Why?

[kokakolia]

2 hours ago, williamcll said:

Can you replace chromeOS with a regular linux?

Yeah, but do you want to? 

 

Just think about it. The end user for this chromebook isn't a tech-savvy, terminal-hacking-troubleshooting machine. Why would they ever touch Linux with a 15 foot pole? 

 

The Chromebook is just set up perfectly out of the box with all of the useful apps. There's minimal hassle. You don't need to solicit IT people to set your devices up for the students. I'm gonna leave it there. Call me a Linux non-believer. I tried it several times, only to get deeply frustrated with having to learn the terminal to do basic things. 

[CTR640]

3 hours ago, jagdtigger said:

Windows.......

Exactly!

[betacollector64]

As a student, it doesn't help that in many cases, I am required to use the Chromebook rather than a personal computer.

[Techstorm970]

On 4/12/2020 at 11:33 AM, kokakolia said:

Yeah, but do you want to? 

 

Just think about it. The end user for this chromebook isn't a tech-savvy, terminal-hacking-troubleshooting machine. Why would they ever touch Linux with a 15 foot pole? 

 

The Chromebook is just set up perfectly out of the box with all of the useful apps. There's minimal hassle. You don't need to solicit IT people to set your devices up for the students. I'm gonna leave it there. Call me a Linux non-believer. I tried it several times, only to get deeply frustrated with having to learn the terminal to do basic things. 

Ever heard of Ubuntu?

[kokakolia]

10 hours ago, Techstorm970 said:

Ever heard of Ubuntu?

I tried:

 

- Ubuntu

- Raspbian

- Linux Mint

- Lubuntu

- Xubuntu

- Ubuntu Mate

- Pop! OS

- Manjaro

- Kubuntu

- Elementary OS

 

Out of all of these distros only Linux Mint (Cinnamon, the other version is poop) was easy to use without numerous bugs and slowdowns. Ubuntu was second place, but it was unexpectedly slow.

 

Aaaaaannddd, the other distros were basically a sad excuse of a GUI (Because you may as well have a GUI on Linux, for the noobs. Yeah, you gotta care about the noobs...). Everything had to be done through the terminal anyways. The menus were always incomplete. And heaven forbid you use the GUI! You'd always encounter a bug and many slowdowns. Ubuntu Mate was the absolute worse! You had 3 distinctive layouts, only 1 worked. The other 2 were glitchy messes. The Ubuntu family is a stupid mess. You have a dozen distros which are hot flaming glitchy garbage, and then you have Ubuntu and the barebones Lubuntu or XFCE. 

 

And it's not like I was using exotic hardware. I was using an old Dell ultrabook with a 4th gen core i5, 8 gb of ram and an SSD. Yeah, it's a little bit outdated but Linux is built for weaker hardware anyways. In the in end I just re-installed Windows 7 which came with the laptop. It ran faster, used less CPU power and RAM and had significantly fewer bugs. 

 

But hey! If Linux works for you then I'm happy. I'm just sharing my experience. Windows is good enough for me. 

[CTR640]

On 4/12/2020 at 8:55 PM, betacollector64 said:

As a student, it doesn't help that in many cases, I am required to use the Chromebook rather than a personal computer.

Why exactly? Just out of curiosity.

[jagdtigger]

6 hours ago, kokakolia said:

Everything had to be done through the terminal anyways

Dont even remember when i had to use a terminal for stuff normies would do...... (I do use the terminal for advanced stuff, especially when messing with system files but thats out of the scope of a normal user.)

[kokakolia]

1 minute ago, jagdtigger said:

Dont even remember when i had to use a terminal for stuff normies would do...... (I do use the terminal for advanced stuff, especially when messing with system files but thats out of the scope of a normal user.)

Like hooking up an external sound card to your computer because the internal sound card sucks. In windows it just takes a few clicks to tell the computer to USE the EXTERNAL sound card. And windows does what you ask. Heck, you don't have to tell windows anything. It will just use the USB sound card. 

 

In Linux, nothing you do matters unless it's done through the terminal. You can switch the sound card in the settings and it won't make a difference. If it's not done through the terminal it doesn't count. You have to hack the system settings through the terminal using some kind of ALSA 0,1 command to tell your computer to disable the internal sound card and use the external one by default. And you can ask 10 different people on the net and you'll get 10 different solutions, most of which won't work.Some people even tell you to remove the physical sound card off your motherboard, because it's that much of a hassle to do it. 

[jagdtigger]

IDK, i use a ubuntu fork called Pop_OS but as soon as i plugged in the USB into the xonar sound card it just jumped over to it without me doing anything.