Those students are being tracked regardless of whether they provided their mobile phone number. ChromeOS is an entire operating system that tracks you from the moment you sign-in with your Google account.
Sure, you can use a guest account, but you won't be able to save anything because the entire OS is "cloud-based".
People rush to Google's defence and say that Google doesn't build ad or marketing profiles from student data. But even if the online activity from students is aggregated or detached from individual accounts, that still means Google holds the personal online behaviour of millions of students. They can now poke and interrogate that data in ways that even they probably haven't fully grasped. And as we've seen from Netflix and Spotify, aggregated data still lets you pull out precise details and behaviour from "anonymised" data (a meaningless term).
Tracking is so pervasive and so normalised that no-one even bothers to ask: why should students be tracked in the first place? Tracking online behaviour is in Google's DNA and no-one does it at such industrial scale.
The hypocrisy of the tech community who have nothing to say on the privacy implications of ChromeOS in schools is hard to understand.
Most of the tracking in your google account is to give you the answers you’re looking for, not because it’s of any benefit other than providing a better service.
Like when I search for a three letter acronym, google knows that I’m an engineer, and I see links for results about computer hardware, and not about a Jewish Torah studies group with the same TLA.
Google makes those models for individual accounts, which is why google can tailor results so well to what you’re looking for right now.
Those students are being tracked regardless of whether they provided their mobile phone number. ChromeOS is an entire operating system that tracks you from the moment you sign-in with your Google account.
Sure, you can use a guest account, but you won't be able to save anything because the entire OS is "cloud-based".
People rush to Google's defence and say that Google doesn't build ad or marketing profiles from student data. But even if the online activity from students is aggregated or detached from individual accounts, that still means Google holds the personal online behaviour of millions of students. They can now poke and interrogate that data in ways that even they probably haven't fully grasped. And as we've seen from Netflix and Spotify, aggregated data still lets you pull out precise details and behaviour from "anonymised" data (a meaningless term).
Tracking is so pervasive and so normalised that no-one even bothers to ask: why should students be tracked in the first place? Tracking online behaviour is in Google's DNA and no-one does it at such industrial scale.
The hypocrisy of the tech community who have nothing to say on the privacy implications of ChromeOS in schools is hard to understand.