Emma Doe’s lawsuit alleged that Google took advantage of the dominant position it has held in schools since 2007 to impose AI on children and seize their data without meaningfully protecting them from the worst potential harms of its sycophantic chatbot design. In Chicago, CPS signed a contract with Google in 2020, “well before Gemini rolled out,” Creswell found. During the next two extensions of this contract, no updates were introduced to protect student privacy as AI advanced.
Creswell said it remained “completely unclear” in the contracts how Google’s processing of student data may have changed, beyond updates to Google Workspace for Education’s privacy policy.
Currently, this policy states that “we receive customer data through the Core Services and process it in accordance with the school’s (customer’s) instructions. This customer data includes anything submitted, stored, sent or received through the Core Services by you or your school.” Google collects this data on this activity, as well as account information “like name, email address and password” and location information, the policy states.
The policy does not mention Gemini, but notes that data from the use of core services helps maintain services, improve personalization and increase security. And “the data we collect in the Additional Services is used in our Services to provide, maintain, and improve our Services; develop new Services; provide personalized Services; measure performance; communicate with you; and protect Google, our users, and the public.”
For parents, the policy does not guarantee that their children’s data is not part of Google’s plan to dominate the AI sector.
“We should not allow children’s data collected in schools to be used for commercial purposes,” Creswell said.
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