UC Berkeley students file a lawsuit against Google

The topic of this article is to explain how Google has been scanning emails in Apps for Education, which is a collection of online tools and services that include Google Drive and Google Mail.  Two years after the fact, four UC Berkeley students and alumni filed a lawsuit against Google Incorporation on Wednesday.  They claimed that UC Berkeley emails were Google's main target of obtaining emails between 2012 and 2014.  Additionally in 2014, nine plaintiffs accused Google of scanning emails for advertising purposes without their permission.  The Plaintiffs accuse Google of scanning emails and that Google violated the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, a federal statute that protects electronic communications while in transit and in storage.  Google has not released any information verifying these accusations, but on behalf of the UC Berkeley students and alumni, as well as the nine plaintiffs, believe that the 2014 post by Google acknowledging that Apps for Education emails had been scanned prove it.  Near the end of this article, Hoofnagle wrote in 2014 that Google would have a hard time defending their claim that users and campuses consented to the interception of their communications.
This article is much like the last article that I posted about.  Apparently, Google knows what they are doing and they know the loopholes and possible consequences but they pursue their goals anyways.  Google should take in to account that others information is not theirs to use for any other purpose.  They are put into place to manage and help, not to violate a persons' individual rights.

Privacy and Security Article

The purpose of this article, in summary, is that Google is being accused of allegedly collecting students search requests through Chromebooks.  Google argues back that they are not doing anything wrong.  The complaint is that Google's storage and analysis of the student profile violates a "Student Privacy Pledge" that the company signed the year before.  This pledge contains a provision guaranteeing that students' personal information will not be exposed for "non-educational" purposes.  This is resulting in Google's investigation by the FTC in order to stop it from using information on students' activities for its own purposes and order it to destroy any information it has collected that is not related to education.  Google believes that they have already been following the laws enforced by the FTC.  The FTC concluded that the company had created a technological loophole that enabled its digital advertising network to shadow the online activities of people using Apple's Safari browser without their consent, which resulted in Google paying a $22.5 million fine.
The idea that Google was able to find a loophole around their "Student Privacy Pledge" in order to obtain information that was not educational based, is scary.  The part that is truly concerning is how Google thought that their actions were not wrong and that they were not violating a persons' rights.  The fact that someone stood up and complained about Google being able to get their information and using it for their own benefit through Apple's Safari browser was a smart idea.  It is a relief to know that the FTC fixed this problem before it got out of hand.