Google’s decision last year to quickly resolve concerns about its Apps for Education (AFE) is looking smarter all the time. As wariness grows about the trove of data collected by the search engine giant, half a dozen European companies are investigating possible violations of their privacy laws. Google faces a deadline this month in the Netherlands to stop targeting ads based on users’ searches without their consent.
Similar issues surfaced at the U-M after it moved its student and staff email accounts from an in-house system to AFE, which includes a U-M-branded version of Google’s Gmail service. The public version of Gmail is free, but users see ads targeted to their interests–which Google learns by scanning their emails for keywords.
The AFE version, which is used by more than 25 million students at schools worldwide, has ads turned off by default. But U-M interim chief information security officer Sol Bermann says concerns arose last March when a lawsuit filed in California alleged that Google could use data gleaned by scanning student accounts to deliver ads in other Google products, such as YouTube or Blogger. “There were concerns about if you’re in a history class, maybe you’re studying Nazi Germany, and a faculty member or a student has a blog,” Bermann says. “Would they potentially start getting sort of right-wing, oddball ads served up for hate literature?”
Google responded that the scanning was never used to generate ads anywhere, and U-M students interviewed by the Observer say they saw no correlation between the content of their AFE emails and ads elsewhere on the web. But within a month, Google announced that it would stop scanning student emails–“not without some pressure from higher education institutions, including U-M,” says Bermann.
