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Google admits data mining student emails in its free education apps
SafeGov.org
Jeff Gould, Peerstone Research
1/31/2014
Excerpt:
When it introduced a new privacy policy designed to improve its ability to target users with ads based on data mining of their online activities, Google said the policy didn’t apply to students using Google Apps for Education. But recent court filings by Google’s lawyers in a California class action lawsuit against Gmail data mining tell a different story: Google now admits that it does data mine student emails for ad-targeting purposes outside of school, even when ad serving in school is turned off, and its controversial consumer privacy policy does apply to Google Apps for Education.
At SafeGov.org our work has long focused on the risks of allowing targeted online advertising into schools. This issue has come to the fore as companies like Google and Microsoft have launched a worldwide race to introduce their web application suites into as many schools as possible. In this article we review the background of this debate and then present important new evidence regarding the practices of one of the leading players, Google.
The suites in question are known as Google Apps for Education and Office 365 Education, respectively, and they include basic apps such as email, word processing, spreadsheets, live document sharing, simple web forms and messaging. Their key selling point is that they offer students something almost as good as a traditional office suite in the convenient format of a browser window, and – best of all for cash-strapped schools – they do so at no cost.
Of course as the economist said there is no such thing as a free lunch, and we must look carefully at the business motives behind these firms’ generosity. Here an important difference between the two leaders emerges. Both Google and Microsoft generate substantial revenues by selling online office suites to government and enterprises for annual subscription fees. If the firms offer essentially the same suites to schools for free, it is surely in part because they hope that when students move into the workplace they will demand the same online tools they learned to use in school. This is a business model that is honest about its intentions and serves the interests of both students and the firms. However, there is an additional component in the Google business model that involves advertising, and this is where the trouble begins.
Both Google and Microsoft offer free ad-based email services to consumers – Gmail and Outlook.com (formerly Hotmail). Google’s Gmail pioneered the technique of targeting ads to users based on profiles of their interests. Google creates the profiles with the help of sophisticated software algorithms that sift through users’ past and present emails, record the things they search for on Google’s search engine, and track the web sites they visit (via the cookies placed on many sites by its DoubleClick ad-serving subsidiary).
The activity performed by these profiling algorithms is known as “data mining”, and their power to make accurate guesses about the tastes and likely behavior of the profiled users is quite remarkable. However, not every free consumer email service uses data mining to target ads. Microsoft’s Hotmail, for example, relied solely on demographic information (such as age, gender and location) provided by users when they register. Hotmail’s successor Outlook.com continues this policy, promising that it “doesn't serve targeted ads based on email contents”. While the ad delivery methods used by the major email providers may differ, the basic idea of offering consumers free email in exchange for ads has proven extraordinarily successful. The top three providers – Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo – together count over one billion users. SafeGov does not take a position on the methods used to target ads in these services. In our view all are legitimate business models, provided that consumers are fully informed of how their data is used and have given their consent.
Whether or to what degree these last two conditions are actually met by specific services such as Gmail or Outlook.com is of course a pertinent question. Currently Google faces legal challenges to its use of consumer data mining in both the U.S. and the European Union. EU data protection authorities in particular have determined that Google fails to inform consumers properly of its conduct or obtain their consent, while a major class action law suit in California advances similar accusations. Although Outlook.com appears to have avoided such challenges to date, we should certainly expect that regulators and courts will hold it to the same high standards as Gmail.
The Google and Microsoft education suites discussed above operate under quite different rules than the firms’ ad-based consumer email services. Office 365, developed from Microsoft’s enterprise server-based software packages such as Exchange and SharePoint, was never designed to serve ads and does not have the functionality to create ad-targeting user profiles based on data mining. Microsoft’s Office 365 web site makes an entirely unambiguous pledge in this regard: “We do not mine your data for advertising purposes.”
Google Apps for Education, by contrast, has a more ambivalent policy regarding advertising. While Google pledges not to serve ads to students without schools’ permission, its Google Apps suite, which is a repurposed version of Google’s Gmail and other consumer services, was designed from the ground up to include ad-serving as well as highly sophisticated user profiling and data mining capabilities. Google explicitly offers schools the option of enabling ad serving to student users of Google Apps for Education. Although it does not yet offer to share the resulting ad revenues with schools that choose the ad-serving option, it has clearly left the door open to such revenue sharing in the future. Indeed, it is hard to see why Google would explicitly write the ad-serving option into its standard contract with schools if it did not hope one day to make ads for students a default and perhaps even mandatory feature of Apps for Education.
..................................
View the complete article at:
http://safegov.org/2014/1/31/google-...education-apps
SafeGov.org
Jeff Gould, Peerstone Research
1/31/2014
Excerpt:
When it introduced a new privacy policy designed to improve its ability to target users with ads based on data mining of their online activities, Google said the policy didn’t apply to students using Google Apps for Education. But recent court filings by Google’s lawyers in a California class action lawsuit against Gmail data mining tell a different story: Google now admits that it does data mine student emails for ad-targeting purposes outside of school, even when ad serving in school is turned off, and its controversial consumer privacy policy does apply to Google Apps for Education.
At SafeGov.org our work has long focused on the risks of allowing targeted online advertising into schools. This issue has come to the fore as companies like Google and Microsoft have launched a worldwide race to introduce their web application suites into as many schools as possible. In this article we review the background of this debate and then present important new evidence regarding the practices of one of the leading players, Google.
The suites in question are known as Google Apps for Education and Office 365 Education, respectively, and they include basic apps such as email, word processing, spreadsheets, live document sharing, simple web forms and messaging. Their key selling point is that they offer students something almost as good as a traditional office suite in the convenient format of a browser window, and – best of all for cash-strapped schools – they do so at no cost.
Of course as the economist said there is no such thing as a free lunch, and we must look carefully at the business motives behind these firms’ generosity. Here an important difference between the two leaders emerges. Both Google and Microsoft generate substantial revenues by selling online office suites to government and enterprises for annual subscription fees. If the firms offer essentially the same suites to schools for free, it is surely in part because they hope that when students move into the workplace they will demand the same online tools they learned to use in school. This is a business model that is honest about its intentions and serves the interests of both students and the firms. However, there is an additional component in the Google business model that involves advertising, and this is where the trouble begins.
Both Google and Microsoft offer free ad-based email services to consumers – Gmail and Outlook.com (formerly Hotmail). Google’s Gmail pioneered the technique of targeting ads to users based on profiles of their interests. Google creates the profiles with the help of sophisticated software algorithms that sift through users’ past and present emails, record the things they search for on Google’s search engine, and track the web sites they visit (via the cookies placed on many sites by its DoubleClick ad-serving subsidiary).
The activity performed by these profiling algorithms is known as “data mining”, and their power to make accurate guesses about the tastes and likely behavior of the profiled users is quite remarkable. However, not every free consumer email service uses data mining to target ads. Microsoft’s Hotmail, for example, relied solely on demographic information (such as age, gender and location) provided by users when they register. Hotmail’s successor Outlook.com continues this policy, promising that it “doesn't serve targeted ads based on email contents”. While the ad delivery methods used by the major email providers may differ, the basic idea of offering consumers free email in exchange for ads has proven extraordinarily successful. The top three providers – Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo – together count over one billion users. SafeGov does not take a position on the methods used to target ads in these services. In our view all are legitimate business models, provided that consumers are fully informed of how their data is used and have given their consent.
Whether or to what degree these last two conditions are actually met by specific services such as Gmail or Outlook.com is of course a pertinent question. Currently Google faces legal challenges to its use of consumer data mining in both the U.S. and the European Union. EU data protection authorities in particular have determined that Google fails to inform consumers properly of its conduct or obtain their consent, while a major class action law suit in California advances similar accusations. Although Outlook.com appears to have avoided such challenges to date, we should certainly expect that regulators and courts will hold it to the same high standards as Gmail.
The Google and Microsoft education suites discussed above operate under quite different rules than the firms’ ad-based consumer email services. Office 365, developed from Microsoft’s enterprise server-based software packages such as Exchange and SharePoint, was never designed to serve ads and does not have the functionality to create ad-targeting user profiles based on data mining. Microsoft’s Office 365 web site makes an entirely unambiguous pledge in this regard: “We do not mine your data for advertising purposes.”
Google Apps for Education, by contrast, has a more ambivalent policy regarding advertising. While Google pledges not to serve ads to students without schools’ permission, its Google Apps suite, which is a repurposed version of Google’s Gmail and other consumer services, was designed from the ground up to include ad-serving as well as highly sophisticated user profiling and data mining capabilities. Google explicitly offers schools the option of enabling ad serving to student users of Google Apps for Education. Although it does not yet offer to share the resulting ad revenues with schools that choose the ad-serving option, it has clearly left the door open to such revenue sharing in the future. Indeed, it is hard to see why Google would explicitly write the ad-serving option into its standard contract with schools if it did not hope one day to make ads for students a default and perhaps even mandatory feature of Apps for Education.
..................................
View the complete article at:
http://safegov.org/2014/1/31/google-...education-apps