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Google has been spying on millions of children and their families in the United States and in Spain . Collecting your personal information that includes: " where they are physically located , the web pages they visit, what they look for in the Google search engine and the results they click on , the videos they see on YouTube, their personal contact information , their voice recordings , the passwords they keep and other information about their behavior . "

These harsh accusations are part of the 24-page imputation brief that Hector Balderas, the Attorney General of New Mexico (United States), has filed against Google and to which PIXEL has had access.

The legal accusation of the New Mexico prosecutor is very hard in his language . He accuses Google of "spying" and of having "deliberately obscure purposes" from the use of data from children with ages "as early as kindergarten " and who have no "relationship to educational purposes."

The document accuses Google of having violated different federal and state laws , in addition to skipping its own terms of use using Google for Education, which they also name as G Suite for Education or simply Google Education in its writing.

Google Education is a package of the North American multinational aimed at elementary, secondary and higher education students that works as a virtual campus in the cloud that includes email, word processor, presentation slides and spreadsheets, among others.

Claim of school excellence in Spain

Google Education is used by many schools in Spain (you can check the complete list in this link to find your children's school from your city or from the postal code of the educational institution).

Spanish schools often advertise their association with Google as a synonym for excellence with the aim of attracting more students using the "Google Reference School" label.

However, it is in the United States, the country in which the judicial process has begun, where it holds an almost hegemonic position in the educational field and is estimated to be used in half of the country's schools .

According to the brief presented by the Prosecutor, more than 80 million educators and students are employed in the United States in the United States.

In the Spanish version of its website, Google for Education claims to be " compliant with compliance with rigorous standards " among which it mentions COPPA , the Child Internet Privacy Protection Act of 1998.

COPPA is part of the US legislation and the indictment of the United States prosecutor's office states that the US company would be violating these laws while ensuring that they are enforced in a misleading manner.

Systematic spying on parents and children

"Although Google Education is promoted to schools, parents and students as a free educational tool, the use of Google Education and other Google products have a very real cost that Google conceals on purpose, " said the prosecutor in his letter.

He also notes that " Google has been making statements and promises to convince parents, teachers and school staff that Google takes student privacy very seriously and only collects data related to the education of its platform. In addition, Google has publicly announced and promised that it would never undermine student data for commercial purposes. "

A series of promises that Google also collects in its version for Spain.

"However," the paper continues, " Google has broken those promises and has deliberately deceived parents and teachers about their commitment to privacy."

Next, the prosecution lists Google’s ways of spying on children in New Mexico and their families.

The specific mention to New Mexico is due to the fact that this is the jurisdiction to which Prosecutor Balderas is attached and for which he has the power to legally claim the company. However, Google Education's data collection and processing processes are global .

In addition to the data outlined in the first paragraph, the prosecution notes that, until April 2014, Google also "undermined students' email accounts , extracting information about them and their data for advertising purposes ."

For the prosecution, "While Google provides Googe Education as a benign tool to respond to schools lacking resources across the country, it secretly uses Google Education as a tool to monitor children while searching the internet , including searches. they do in their homes, in their personal computers, in their phones and in their private networks. "

An espionage that the prosecution calls "especially worrisome" as teenagers turn to the Internet to search on issues they are afraid or embarrassed to ask parents, friends or family members for health-related information, sex education, diet advice , how to deal with bullying, anxiety or depression among others. "

In fact, Google itself prohibits children under 13 from opening accounts on their servers. However, according to the New Mexico prosecutor's office, Google uses "Google Education to access and store information" for children .

Google recognized him before Congress

To assemble its indictment, the Balderas refers to statements that Google executives made in investigation commissions of the United States Congress related to Google Education.

In this regard, he notes that "the data that Google accumulates is stored in profiles attributed to each student and Google uses them for its own commercial purposes, as Google itself acknowledged in a congressional interrogation on the practices associated with Google Education."

Unlike the content of the investigation commissions of the Congress and the Senate of Spain, the people called to testify before the committees of the Congress and the United States Senate are obliged to tell the truth under penalty of imprisonment.

If it is proven that the appearing parties lied to the citizens' representatives, it is not surprising that they end up behind bars. The conviction against Roger Stone, the campaign advisor to President Trump , who was sentenced to 40 months of deprivation of liberty for lying before Congress was recently announced.

Family profiles

One of the most worrisome aspects that is present in the lawsuit is Google’s ability to relate the profiles , and all the sensitive information they contain, to the parents' accounts. Something that would happen on a regular basis when parents helped their children to do their homework.

"Students are encouraged to connect to their Google Education accounts on the Chrome search engine for their family member's personal computers. When they do, there is an option to turn on Google Sync and associate the use of family Chrome data with the Google Education student profile, which associates even more data with its student profile, "says the brief.

Profiles that Google itself publishes that will remain available even years after the kids have finished their studies.

"In addition," says the accusation, "once students are registered in their Google Education accounts, Google uses cookies to identify students and begins to essentially collect everything they do on the Internet ."

Rains, it pours

If the prosecution of the New Mexico prosecutor's office flourished, it would not be the first time that Google would have been convicted of collecting and misusing children's personal data.

In September last year, Google agreed to pay a fine of 170 million dollars to settle a process that accused him of violating federal and New York state laws for illegally collecting data from children who had been watching videos on YouTube.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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