Hacker News Reader

Comment by lrenaud | Hacker News Reader

A friend of mine works in IT for district doing this. They have under a dozen IT staff serving five k-12 schools. In the past he worked in a much larger distinct with a Dell based laptop program.

One of the reasons they love the Chrome system rather than a more traditional install (be it Linux or Windows), is when some clueless student comes in saying: "it broken," the staff can wipe the device clean in a second. The student can log back into the Google services to bring their account back, and they minimize undue downtime to repair software problems created by the students.

Could you get something similar going under an alternative distribution, sure, but with this they're is no labor/cost overhead associated with maintaining the server systems and software.

View on HN

2 IT staff per school, especially if they're shared across a group of schools, seems quite a lot. How many pupils would they be serving; what would be the main places were the IT personnel were shorthanded?

> no labor/cost overhead associated with maintaining the server systems and software.

There sure is! It's just serviced by Google instead of you, and funded by your students' data instead of money.

So sick of the knee-jerk 'paying by data' argument for EVERY.DAMN.THING.

Google does not do whatever analysis you're claiming on education accounts, btw. Sure, they may be leveraging education accounts to get other 'paid' contracts, but they. are. not. monetizing. student. data. While I am myself a little bit of a cynic, sometimes it pays to tone down on the cynicism and see things in a slightly more positive light.

Is there some agreement from Google not to analyse student computers or are you assuming Google wouldn't stoop so low? Is it a general position for all educational users?

Here is Google's page on it:

https://www.google.com/edu/trust

And it states:

>>No. Google doesn’t assume ownership of any customer data in Google Apps for Education core services, and it says so in our contracts (under “Intellectual Property”).<<

Which only addresses ownership, not usage. On that topic, they claim:

> Google Apps for Education services don't collect or use student data for advertising purposes or to create ads profiles.

Which leaves a lot of possible other uses on the table.

Claiming ownership of customer data would be way beyond any moral line it's kinda crazy that the company that used to say "don't be evil" needs to say it.

The policy keeps saying things like:

>"Google Apps for Education services don't collect or use student data for advertising purposes or to create ads profiles."

Just make me wonder, well if they're only promising not to use it for advertising purposes then what use are they making of it; why isn't it just "will not use student data for any purposes without express and explicit permission"?

There are a lot of uses that are benign or beneficial, such as indexing emails for easier searching, etc but having to have an explicit permission prompt for every one of those uses would severly hinder UX

It doesn't need to be a UX thing, just provide an itemized list of the ways in which the data will be used on a page like the one linked.

They choose not to do this, arguably because they know what sort of reactions that list would evoke.

I believe they said somewhere that they don't analyze business accounts (because they are paid) or educational accounts (for the sake of good will).

   No it's simply a long play by    Google today Microsoft almost  has a monopoly in the workplace because of Microsoft office and windows and how people are used to it when they join the workforce.
   Later as more people join the workforce having used Google app more corporations will be will to move to it as the cost of retraining will be less.
  If Google let's students use Google apps without mining their data today they can mine it later when they are not students and join the workforce as adults. And anyway they are selling Google services to recover the costs.

Here.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2016/02/0...

http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2014/03/13/26google.h33.ht...

Agree on the knee jerk reaction to be very cynical towards everything google does, I'm sure in doing this we miss things that were relatively altruistic (assuming they do those things).

However, leveraging education accounts to get other 'paid' contracts, and exposing their technology, values, and brand to students at an early age is actually has quite a bit of value. It is a profitable long term move, that can have a very big payoff, if they can get people into the walled garden that is google services as early as possible.

The same value that's currently going to google doesn't necessarily get instantly more palatable in Canonical's hands, but if I were to give a student something to learn on (on which they could quite possibly discovery programming, or systems administration), I'd give them the less-locked-down Ubuntu.

This strategy seems like it leaves less of an avenue to create software, than just consume it (from the web).

How do you think Google makes money on random student data? they couldn't monetize MySpace well so I'd consider this data worthless here.

Thank you! I happen to work in the edtech industry, and student privacy is one of those totems that i'm always scratching my head about. All of these edtech companies are always being accused of collecting student data for marketing purposes, but honestly, I don't think homework or attendance records are particularly valuable to anyone but a student, parents, and teachers. I think it's pretty asinine that anyone would think that that type of data is monetizable. I think the problem is really our (as technologists) fault. We tend to refer to any data as data, when we should be specifying what types of data we are referring. Personal details vs activity data vs application analytical data, etc.

I want to note that just because the data doesn't "look" valuable to you now doesn't mean it isn't. There are lots of types of data that didn't seem valuable before people connected some dots and realized they are.

Attendance records could be very valuable. If I can determine trends in what days you attend school, which classes you attend, and with which frequency, I might be able to create an even more specific advertising audience to sell to ad publishers. "high school students who showed affinity for Cooking class" (assuming most high schools even offer a home ec/cooking class) might be a very compelling ad segment to some up-and-coming social baking app or something.

Sorry that's just not how targeted advertising works. Seriously with MySpace you had TONS AND TONS of data about posting history, likes, affinities and such and it made virtually no impact on monetization. Things like attendance are laughably irrelevant to ad dollars.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com