Deeper than that, if it wrong to allow intrusive profiling and spying on kids who cannot give informed consent, then it is wrong to allow it in adults who understand the cost, but need to use the poisoned devices anyway.
Better to ban the collection, than the devices.
But, I am dreaming of a better world that would never happen.
Yeah, we’re basically forcing everyone to hand over their data to Google as soon as they enter school this way. 
We need these machines as teaching aids. You can argue about blackboards having been fine for centuries, but in the modern world we actually can’t manage to prepare younglings for the digital life they’ll lead through such analogue means.
So the change needs to be forced to stop this profiling and data collection.
For the people saying “why not Apple or Microsoft”, as far as I’m aware neither of these companies offer “free” cloud-based VLEs for schools. Both have cloud services, iCloud and One Drive respectively, but particularly after Covid lockdowns Google Classroom really took off as the defacto (and cheap) way of getting work to and from students, and lessons were and continue to be hosted on Google Meet. In theory Microsoft Teams could be used for this, but as far as I’m aware no one does use it in this way, and Apple just doesn’t have anything like this to restrict in the first place.
The fact that Google essentially re-utilised the now-defunct Google+ backend to acquire and sell the personal data of school children is indisputably evil imo.
On the subject of Teams, I think its saving grace is that it is so hilariously awful no one even wants to use it, so it’s not really on anyone’s radar. I find it funny when people are like “ew, why do you use Teams it’s terrible on Linux” as if 1) I have a choice and it’s not because my boss demands it, and 2) it runs no worse on Linux than it does on Windows. It’s just shit wherever you are lmfao.
Classic Google move though.
Supporting a small fleet of machines and people using them, Teams is the number 2 complaint right after “it did that by itself”.
The common complaint I’ve seen on tech forums is “Google Workspaces for Education” requires a student to link their “personal” Google account vs the school issuing student accounts which opens up a can of privacy/profiling risks. The other risk I’ve also read about is Google ever changing terms of Workspaces for Education, there were a few universities which got themselves locked into having to shell out more money for storage when all Google accounts were downsized to 15GB shared between email, Docs & GDrive(in the past email was considered unlimited). In the higher education sector its quite common for prof/instructors/TAs having to fall back to sharing PDFs(lecture stuff) via Google Docs/Drive as its easier than Microsoft OneDrive.
Considering I’ve mostly used GDocs/GDrive for science/research work, much of the targeted ads in GMail is very useless at best.
MS actually offers quite significant discounts for the Education packages, which make is quite appealing. It comes with the added benefit that you can use the Office suite for the whole supporting staff as well, and by running Windows on your desktops can also use regular Windows applications.
ChromeOS is just way to handicapped for use outside of the couple classroom use cases. The idea of everything as web-based apps is not feasible for both staff and students who need to do design or rendering work for instance.
But for most primary/secondary schools, a browser is usually enough. That makes it that you see a clear split there between those using Chromebooks and MS suites.
And if we put all data the data mining to the side, the next big concern is the branding effect… Children come to school for the first time, or after a summer break, and are excited and open for new lectures and knowledge and in that regard they have their parades down and their skepticism tucked away (mom said it’s gonna be great!). Then the first thing that welcomes them is the Google logo, the next thing is Google this and Google that and in that way they are impregnated with Google being something good and that may stick for the rest of their lives. I wonder how much that is worth to Google? My guess is: A LOT!
In this post, Google is called out as the bad guy; It could as well have been Microsoft or Apple or something completely different. Brand neutrality should be a requirement when dealing with kids, but that seems pretty far fetched these days.
Ideally you would remove any branding, because that is certainly worth a whole lot for those companies. The schools are paying for the privilege of imprinting our most impressionable demographic with their branding. That’s just wrong…
I understand that you can’t completely get away from that. But with the pervasive nature of these companies in the tech worlds, it would be nice to actually educate them before they get a choice made for them.
I would love to see more open source options, but there you come into the problems of lack of (paid) support, higher maintenance costs and needing to train everyone on a system they’re not already familiar with.
I did not kind the indoctrination-for-discount as much, even though people settle into grooves for life.
But, it is for Sure a real thing. Especially for normies who want things to “just work” which is a fair request
I would be surprised if the tech firms didn’t have a dollar figure of worth. Then they know how much leeway to offer tiers of discounts to tiers of education levels.
I don’t mean to imply the products are not good, and not worth money, but the value of indoctrination and branding, should be offset by discounts on products. Then the added profiling in to makes extra money at the cost of the victim.
I remember that with Facebook they mentioned something about the account worth per quarter some years ago 
I think it was something with “lost profits” due to blocking of something or the like… But I’m not certain there. Though that was due to advert losses. Not even brand recognition/worth.
And yeah, the products themselves are fine! I have no problems with paying for them, but I would like to cut out the profiling. Or rather; I would like to have those tech giants cut up into different actually separate companies which wouldn’t be able to just share their data. That way you would have to (more) openly deal in data transfers and the costs of the separate services and value of the profiles would become more transparant.
But as long as those companies have more budget to just pay fines instead of complying to regulations, then it doesn’t happen…
The EU does not care about size, thank the gods. They stand for personal privacy and punish any size business if they break the rules. A lesson the US Gov should learn if they can stop the NSA plundering data centers around the world.
The siphoning of personal info for profit is a business model that should be ended with extreme prejudice.
yes, I know that students actually get free access to Office 365 (but staff don’t, interestingly). I think the actual VLE is the bigger issue, though. As much as I’d love all school to be using FOSS software, I don’t think any meaningful tracking is being done via Microsoft Word. Google Classroom, however, is an entirely different kettle of fish.
I know that Microsoft Teams is used extensively in business, but in my experience it is not touched by school students.
We actually do run Teams for Education, which during the plague was used instead of an actual LMS/VLE
We’re currently switching to a proper solution. Which means that we won’t need to manage Teams groups for each class anymore, which is great!
But fully fledged LMS systems are not for every school. It depends on what the needs are and I certainly wouldn’t recommend it for every school.
And while not for free, we do offer the same prices for both students and personnel for Office. (Note that these are the personal use prices, students and personnel can just use fully licensed stuff for school/work.)
For the stand-alone package:
Yes… It is the students who pay a premium!
Though they also get M365 for a reduced subscription… (This is the per year price.)
Though as employees we can make use of the Microsoft Home Use Program, which makes the subscriptions quite a bit cheaper for personal use.
I can’t change my current plan to see all the prices for a screenshot, because I’ve got it filled up at the moment. But a family plan then costs €69,30, with a personal plan being somewhere in mid 40s if I recall correctly.
There was some tracking being done here in NL, through the productivity tracking “feature”… But that didn’t last long because it was too invasive for Dutch law. And in general, I hear from friends at other companies here that they don’t see any use for the feature. It is a great tool if you don’t trust your employees at all and want to spy on them, which doesn’t fly well with most company cultures here.
What about the standard win 10/11 telemetry that just comes with running the system. MS are getting more and more into advertising in the OS and apple have been working on their own ad tech and profiling within their own system too.
I get that the office feature is the thing at fault here but I can’t recify the situation in my head. People are worried about chromebooks profiling them but literally anything with an internet connection is doing that regardless of if we own it or not, by which I mean even things like on street smart advertising, you don’t get a choice in that.
Not to play this down, it is a thing that should be looked into for sure but its “the one stick holding up the entire weight of the tech world” idea. You pull that out and the pile collapses. Not a good thing but odd to stop at specifically google, specifically chromebooks and specifically school. There are a great many more devices doing the same thing to the same people and far less under our personal control.
Yeah. Tbh I used to just use my dad’s Office 365 licence back when I used Windows. He only used it on one machine, I think he put one on my mum’s PC, he had like three left over. I was sceptical at first but I think Office 365 is reasonably priced enough and gets you a whole household worth of licences, it’s a much better deal than buying like Office 97 for a single machine for hundreds of pounds and running that version until it won’t run on your OS anymore. I think it’s better than LibreOffice by just enough – particularly Impress if you make and deliver a lot of presentations – to be worthwhile for some people.
That said, apart from Impress (which has a particularly ironic name) I am more than happy with the rest of LibreOffice plus Thunderbird as a replacement for Office. And as for Google Suite, I don’t use it if I have a choice or if I’m doing something collaborative. If a lot of people need read/write access simultaneously nothing else seems to do it better. For a single user, it’s just lacking enough features before you even get to my issues with Google for me to not want to use it.
I wonder if these are related.
So, today I found out that this case started because a parent found out that his child (without parental concent) had a Youtube account with his/hers full name, the name of the school and the educational stage. The parent wondered about this because the child never had made such an account and the parent then concluded that the account was related to the account made in school on a Chromebook. Apparently this happened because of a setting which would sign the children up for additional Google services without them knowing it.
Another part of the complaint was that the Schools had put stickers with the childrens credentials on (some of) the provided Chromebooks, so anyone who would get access to the hardware also would have access to the childrens data.
The parent reported this to the Danish data authority (Datatilsynet) and they concluded that the city of Helsingoer (Helsingør) was not operating within compliance of the law (GDPR) and that is why the usage of Chromebooks was banned. The authority gave Helsingoer the opportunity to document that their usage of Chromebooks was in compliance with the law, but they failed to do so and today the ban has been cemented; No Chromebooks in Helsingoer, back to pen and paper!
In general, danish authorities advice against the usage of Chromebooks and Google Workspace in schools because of the problems with data security. Do not let the woolves guard the cheep, I guess!
I am a bit behind watching Youtube but in the Level1 News… Oh, sorry… The Level1 Talkshow, that is, 26. of July, @Wendell and @Ryan made the assumption/claim that the ban was related to data sharing when using helpdesk. This is completely unrelated to the ban and if it has not been corrected since, it should be at some point! 
Sad… because a kid (probably more) had a YouTube account?
Sounds more like google doxxed the student by creating a youtube account with all the information as the name.
Thats not good anywhere. Just because they are all google means you want to be signed up for it with that info
Very interesting reading how Europe thinks and handles data privacy…in Australia we are only now considering the consequences of hosted data and mainly at a individual company or corporation level