Google Knows Everything About Your Child

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On his blog, Mercola.com, Dr. Joseph Mercola raises the alarm over children’s privacy and Google’s deep knowledge about your kids. He writes:

Google is without a doubt the largest and clearest monopoly on the planet. It dominates online searches and advertising,^1,2 which in and of itself leads to automatic bias. As noted by Google’s founders Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page in their 1998 paper,³ “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,” “… [W]e expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers.”

Google has also infiltrated many other areas of our day-to-day lives, having acquired dozens of other companies⁴ you might not realize belong to Google or its parent company, Alphabet.

Among the most well-known are YouTube, the largest video platform on the web, and Android, one of the most popular operating systems worldwide.^5,6 Google also has significant influence over urban development,⁷ health care^8,9 and childhood education.

Google Has Become Ubiquitous in American Classrooms

Google’s influence over young children has been a concern for years. As noted in a 2014 article¹⁰ in the International Business Times, “How Google Took Over the American Classroom and Is Creating a Gmail generation”:

“Google apps, services and increasingly, Chromebooks, have become ubiquitous in the American classroom and it’s not hard to understand why: they require no expensive hardware, they never need to be updated, and they’re free, an important consideration for cash-strapped districts …

South Carolina’s Richland School District 2 boasts 22,000 Chromebooks, which covers a student populace nearing 27,000, who also use Google Apps.

That makes for a sizeable student population that will become accustomed to utilizing Google services … ‘Education is at the core of Google’s mission — to remove the four walls of the classroom and make the world’s information accessible to all students,’ a Google spokeswoman said.”

And if you think this may have slowed over the years, it’s even more prevalent now. In June 2022, The Washington Post likened it to a stranger watching your child through their bedroom window¹¹ with nearly every key stroke and app your child uses. “Apple and Google run the app stores,” the Post says, “so what are they doing about it? Enabling it.”

The tracking apps are now even more deeply entrenched in your child’s schools since the pandemic, with teachers able to not only watch what your child is doing on their computer, but to actually take their mouse away and close tabs they don’t want your child looking at during home-based classroom activities.¹²

And, as they return to school, teachers plan to continue to monitor their students in this way:” According to a report … from the Center for Democracy and Technology, 89% of teachers have said that their schools will continue using student-monitoring software, up 5 percentage points from last year,” Wired reported.¹³

In one ray of hope, the Federal Trade Commission wants to clamp down on these tracking activities, and sent out a warning on it in May 2022.¹⁴

Announcing that it plans to “crack down on education technology companies if they illegally surveil children when they go online to learn,” the commission reminded tracking companies and schools that “it is against the law for companies to force parents and schools to surrender their children’s privacy rights in order to do schoolwork online or attend class remotely.” Whether Google and other tracking agencies pay attention, though, remains to be seen.

Google Will Know Everything About Your Child

For all its conveniences, Google still poses a very real threat to all these children. As noted in a 2017 article¹⁵ in The New York Times — which details the strategic moves that allowed Google to take over the American classroom — “schools may be giving Google more than they are getting: generations of future customers.”

In 2012, less than 1% of the tablets and laptops used in the U.S. school system were Google Chromebooks. By 2015, more than half the devices sold to K-12 schools were Chromebooks, equipped with a free suite of Google apps and education-specific programs.¹⁶

When you consider Google’s primary business is tracking, compiling, storing and selling personal data, by capturing children at an early age, it will be able to build the most comprehensive personality profiles of the population ever conceived — and there’s no opt-out feature for this data gathering.¹⁷ As reported by The Washington Post in 2015:¹⁸

“… [I]n a filing with the Federal Trade Commission, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) argued Google is tracking nearly everything students are doing when they are signed into their Google accounts and, in some cases, using that information to build profiles and serve them targeted ads in certain Google programs.”

By the time these children have grown into adulthood, every single preference, thought, belief and proclivity will be known about them, which will make them extremely vulnerable to manipulation, not only through targeted advertising¹⁹ but also through what might be called customized censorship or targeted social engineering — in essence, the strategy of tailoring the information any given individual can see in order to shape and mold their prejudices and ideas. The Washington Post writes:²⁰

“Google makes $30 per device by selling management services for the millions of Chromebooks that ship to schools. But by habituating students to its offerings at a young age, Google obtains something much more valuable.

Every year, several million American students graduate from high school. And not only does Google make it easy for those who have school Google accounts to upload their trove of school Gmail, Docs and other files to regular Google consumer accounts — but schools encourage them to do so …

That doesn’t sit well with some parents. They warn that Google could profit by using personal details from their children’s school email to build more powerful marketing profiles of them as young adults …

Unlike Apple or Microsoft, which make money primarily by selling devices or software services, Google derives most of its revenue from online advertising — much of it targeted through sophisticated use of people’s data …

‘Unless we know what is collected, why it is collected, how it is used and a review of it is possible, we can never understand with certainty how this information could be used to help or hurt a kid,’ said Bill Fitzgerald of Common Sense Media, a children’s advocacy group, who vets the security and privacy of classroom apps.”