February 11, 2015
I posted a follow-up – Normalizing Google (and Surveillance, and Corporate Influence) in Schools – on September 18, 2015.
We watched the documentary Fed Up this winter, about the role of sugar in the U.S. obesity epidemic. The introduction of fast food vendors to public school cafeterias played a pivotal role.
Fast forward a few decades and we’re now verging on a privacy epidemic, with our everyday actions and conversations catalogued in corporate and government databases. (For more on that, I direct you to the documentary Terms and Conditions May Apply or the interactive Terms of Service comic.)
All of which is why I was dismayed to see my children’s school district announce that they would be adopting Google Apps for Education (GAFE) for “collaboration and communication.”
Why Google Apps? Because it’s free and everyone else is doing it. (Multiple neighboring school districts have already made the move, ensuring that every school district in our area is now on board with Google.) Google has become status quo.
Software can be benign and useful. Software is a tool. Google Apps is not just software. Google is a massive advertising and data mining corporation with an agenda, that our public schools are entrusting our children’s privacy and data to, in large part to cut costs. The same pressures, and logic, that justified installing Pizza Hut and Taco Bell in the cafeteria.
If you’re inclined to feel that fast food companies without regard for public health have no place in our public schools, it follows that a corporation whose primary mission is selling personalized advertising based on aggregate data has no business playing a central role in our children’s learning. One concern is that large social networks and data companies have a tendency to gather data first and sort out the legal concerns later; We don’t know where all this data will end up. Another is seeing young children opted in by default to perceiving an advertising and data mining platform as status quo or, worse, benevolent.
“Before we give doors and toasters sentience, we should decide what we’re comfortable with first” provides further insight into these concerns:
– Users rarely have the ability to see what an app does with their data, and who else has access to it.
– Companies have to build secure databases to store ever-increasing quantities of data. The more data in one place, the more tempting a target it is for those engaged in corporate espionage, identity theft, or simple vandalism.
– Digital services are moving from being optional to being necessary when it comes to functioning in modern society, and those services are often monopoly-like, with business models based on extracting wealth from personal data. Some services assume copyright over our personal data - from photos to blog posts - when uploaded; some services can disappear one day without warning, meaning the loss of what can be years of work and memories.
– Mass surveillance of civilian populations is possible because of the ubiquity of smartphones and computers.
As with fast food in schools, we’re making decisions for our children that will have long-term consequences. The question to ask is: Are we making the right choices on behalf of our children when it comes to long-term privacy, identity, and ownership implications?