Google's Apps for Education and the New Privacy Policy

In late January when Google announced that it was replacing 60 different privacy policies across its multiple sites and services with a single one, you might have thought Congress had taken up SOPA and PIPA again. That's how loud the outrage was from much of the social galaxy, as reflected in this Gizmodo headline: "Google's Broken Promise: The End of 'Don't Be Evil.'" Other observers, such as Forbes "privacy pragmatist" Kashmir Hill, questioned what the big deal was; after all, she wrote, Google wasn't changing much other than how it targets ads to users and creates new innovative services: "Using information from Gmail to suggest more appropriate YouTube videos or reminding an Android smartphone user that they have a Google calendar appointment in a half hour on the other side of town doesn’t strike me as the work of Lucifer." But what has been ignored in these discussions is the impact that could be felt by schools that have signed up for Google Apps for Education. More...