A lawsuit filed against Google in 2014 has re-sparked the discussion over the company’s email scanning practices. They claimed that Google has disobeyed the privacy laws of students by using email scanning to collect the private profile of students and point them with ads. The plaintiffs are trying to recover all the harm for the Gmail users.
The lawsuit raises several questions regarding the decorum of Google’s privacy policies, but the tricky question is, whether the Google Chromebooks are really affordable. There are numerous web based laptops, which run the applications of Google for the education of children; means Chromebooks comprise the cyber security of students also.
Although, Google has modified some advertising policies, but these changes are worth enough?
After seeing a public response from the lawsuit, Google permanently deactivated advertisements in applications for education irrespective of whether administrators agreed to them. Privacy advocates proclaim that Google is a dollar short and a day late when it comes to securing user’s privacy. Bradley Shear, the social media lawyer thinks that deactivating ads in applications are a senseless effort by Google to pacify skeptics.
He also questioned that, “Would it be possible for Google to switch off the behavioral and scanning advertising function for its other services like a YouTube in a school setting”. Will Google reconsider all the contracts done with school to follow this announcement? Will Google modify its terms and conditions of privacy policies and service policies that regulate all of its education offerings? Will Google also modifies its Chromebook and android policies for better protection?
Shear’s wanted to say that Google is still mining the information from Chromebooks and free to use that data on other services just to publicize to Chromebook users.
The Google Chromebook – a gold mine for spies and hackers?
The Chromebooks are being on sale because of its cloud based approach. It has a very small internal storage, that’s why; whatever you store in Chromebooks, automatically get stored in the cloud. Whether it is your important document, emails or pictures, etc. all are exist only on server of Google. As the data does not exist in the internal drive, so users have very less control over their data.
The Google response about the security of Chromebook’s to the people is, “it is one of the safest laptops you can every buy”. The company states that the data mining practices of the Chromebooks are completely transparent. However, users believe that Google’s company line continue to be seen.