Security News > 2020 > February > Google denies illegally slurping data off free student Chromebooks
New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas is suing Google over its alleged slurping of students' data off of the free Chromebooks it passes out to needy schools and from its free G Suite for Education products, including Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Docs, Sheets, and other apps.
According to the complaint, which was filed in the US District Court for the District of New Mexico on Thursday, Google has marketed its suite - formerly known as Google Education - to schools, parents and children as a "Free and purely educational tool", but in actuality, it comes "At a very real cost that Google purposefully obscures."
Google has used its access to collect "Massive" amounts of data from young children, Balderas said, not to benefit the schools with which Google has contracted, but to profit off it.
In September 2019, the Federal Trade Commission fined Google $170 million for illegally sucking up kids' data so it could target them with ads.
To drive up adoption in schools, Google has publicly promised that it takes students' privacy seriously and that it will never mine student data for its own commercial purposes, the lawsuit says.