Cloud-based education apps could be data mining for ads
February 3, 2014
Grazed from FierceGovernmentIT. Author: David Perera.
A public sector cloud computing association says court filings made by Google in its defense against a lawsuit filed over email keyword-targeted advertising show the search engine giant mining educational users data for ad targeting purposes. Google offers "Apps for Education," for which it turns off ads by default, notes Jeff Gould, chief executive officer of San Francisco, Calif.-based Peerstone Research, in a blog post on SafeGov.org.
SafeGov describes itself as a forum for information technology providers and experts who are dedicated to promoting trusted and responsible cloud computing solutions for the public sector. But, declarations by a Google attorney (.pdf) and an employee (.pdf) in lawsuit filed in the U.S. Northern California district by some Gmail users who allege that Gmail machine email reading amounts to a violation of wiretapping law show that Google is in at least some cases scanning Apps for Education emails in order to target ads on other Google platforms, such as YouTube…
"Google’s data mining and ad serving practices in the versions of Google Apps it provides to public sector institutions such as government administrations and schools have long been a subject of controversy," Gould adds, noting that the issue intensified after Google rolled out a unified privacy policy in early 2012…
Read more from the source @ http://www.fiercegovernmentit.com/story/cloud-based-education-apps-could-be-data-mining-ads/2014-02-03
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