This article is actually far less helpful an overview then the earlier article mentioned at the top "Google is tracking students as it sells more products to schools, privacy advocates warn"[0]. It is really only introducing one new angle to the debate which is interesting enough, but I recommend reading the earlier one first.

It raises the far more interesting point that Google's Apps For Education policies are very granular and services such as Google Search and YouTube are allegedly not covered under the primary agreement - they carry completely different T&C's and may be used for advertising and data harvesting. It is highly likely that students logged in to GMail or Google Docs and doing schoolwork will be doing searches and watching (hopefully) educational videos to learn more about a subject. Those activities may not be covered by the educational use privacy policy.

What percentage of parents know this, even among those that bothered to check the T&C's? Did they notice the exception? What percentage of teachers or school administrators take the initiative and disable all non-core Google Apps For Education services like Google Search (which are enabled by default)? This is the conversation parents and school administrators need to be having.

I don't begrudge a advertising giant like Google from relentlessly collecting and data mining users to manipulate them, that's what ad companies do after all. Savvy users and regulators know this and can take appropriate action to guide the less-technical with safe defaults. I do think the defaults here are not safe from a privacy perspective, and I wonder if the time has come to re-examine whether the non-core services not covered by the educational privacy terms should be disabled by default.

[0]https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/12/28...