Google Removes Ads from Apps for Education

Posted by Kenneth Ronkowitz on

More than 30 million students, teachers and administrators globally rely on Google Apps for Education. About 40 percent of nonprofit colleges use Google for institutional email. Under pressure from privacy advocates, Google announced that it had permanently removed all ads from its Apps for Education. That includes the Gmail service. That means that the company can no longer harvest students’ information for advertising purposes.



Google had previously given college administrators the option of allowing the company to scan student Gmail accounts for key words and to deliver targeted advertisements to those students. Apparently, few administrators opted to allow the ads so many users won’t actually see a change.



Google said that Gmail collects data on all incoming and outgoing messages for several reasons. The practice allows the company to identify certain messages as spam, and makes it possible for users to unearth old emails with key-word searches. Scanning for potential advertising key words was part of that larger process, but the company has isolated and eliminated that part of the scanning process for Google Apps clients.



In California, two college students joined a recent attempt to bring a class-action lawsuit against Google for violating state and federal privacy laws in its data-collection techniques, according to Education Week. There has been discussion about whether Google’s data collection might violate Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). 



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