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This is an article on why you should stop using Google Classroom and raise awareness to get your school to accept alternate education software. Like other Google products, Google Classroom has a history of privacy and performance issues. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the rise of online learning, it gained a higher marketshare, and claimed more victims. It is illegal to collect data on children under the age of 13 in most countries, notably the United States, and Canada, yet students are still being violated when teachers force them to use Google Classroom. This article contains more information on the issue, and lists ways to alternate.
04.0 - Other things to check out
Like other Google products, Google Classroom has a history of privacy and performance issues. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the rise of online learning, it gained a higher marketshare, and claimed more victims. It is illegal to collect data on children under the age of 13 in most countries, notably the United States, and Canada, yet students are still being violated when teachers force them to use Google Classroom. This article contains more information on the issue, and lists ways to alternate.
General description from Wikipedia: Google_Classroom - Data from Februry 17th 2021 at 3:47:30 pm (PT: Pacific Time)
Google Classroom is a free web service developed by Google for schools that aims to simplify creating, distributing, and grading assignments. The primary purpose of Google Classroom is to streamline the process of sharing files between teachers and students. It is estimated between 40 to 100 million people use Google Classroom.
Google Classroom integrates Docs, Sheets, Slides, Gmail, and Calendar into a cohesive platform to manage student and teacher communication. Students can be invited to join a class through a private code, or automatically imported from a school domain. Teachers can create, distribute and mark assignments all within the Google ecosystem. Each class creates a separate folder in the respective user's Drive, where the student can submit work to be graded by a teacher. Assignments and due dates are added to Google calendar, each assignment can belong to a category (or topic). Teachers can monitor the progress for each student by reviewing revision history of a document, and after being graded, teachers can return work along with comments.
Google has a very very bad record when it comes to user privacy. (I could go on and on with evidence of this, but it took a long time to find and go through all these articles)
Privacy on Google products is always bad, due to all Google products containing spyware. Google claims to not spy on school children anymore (unless the teachers turn the option on to do so) but Google cannot be trusted, and we can't know for sure, due to Google Classroom being closed source (proprietary) software.
No matter what you do, when you are using Google Classroom, all of your sensitive personal data is being sent to Google and others. Google has also been spotted going through open programs. For example, from personal experience (on Firefox) with a YouTube tab open that I didn't visit, I watched several videos offline (VLC Media Player) Later when I went to check the recommendations, it was nearly everything that I had watched. There is no doubt they are spying on other programs too.
In Chrome (and many other browsers) an incognito mode is present. In Chrome, this mode is pointless, as Google will still mine your data. Even if you turn data mining/tracking off, and enable the "do not track" signal, surprise suprise, Google is still mining your data.
If you think you have nothing to hide, you are absolutely wrong. This argument has been debunked many times over:
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Edward Snowden remarked "Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say. "When you say, ‘I have nothing to hide,’ you’re saying, ‘I don’t care about this right.’ You’re saying, ‘I don’t have this right, because I’ve got to the point where I have to justify it.’ The way rights work is, the government has to justify its intrusion into your rights."
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Daniel J. Solove stated in an article for The Chronicle of Higher Education that he opposes the argument; he stated that a government can leak information about a person and cause damage to that person, or use information about a person to deny access to services even if a person did not actually engage in wrongdoing, and that a government can cause damage to one's personal life through making errors. Solove wrote "When engaged directly, the nothing-to-hide argument can ensnare, for it forces the debate to focus on its narrow understanding of privacy. But when confronted with the plurality of privacy problems implicated by government data collection and use beyond surveillance and disclosure, the nothing-to-hide argument, in the end, has nothing to say."
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Adam D. Moore, author of Privacy Rights: Moral and Legal Foundations, argued, "it is the view that rights are resistant to cost/benefit or consequentialist sort of arguments. Here we are rejecting the view that privacy interests are the sorts of things that can be traded for security." He also stated that surveillance can disproportionately affect certain groups in society based on appearance, ethnicity, sexuality, and religion.
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Bruce Schneier, a computer security expert and cryptographer, expressed opposition, citing Cardinal Richelieu's statement "If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged", referring to how a state government can find aspects in a person's life in order to prosecute or blackmail that individual. Schneier also argued "Too many wrongly characterize the debate as 'security versus privacy.' The real choice is liberty versus control."
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Harvey A. Silverglate estimated that the common person, on average, unknowingly commits three felonies a day in the US.
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Emilio Mordini, philosopher and psychoanalyst, argued that the "nothing to hide" argument is inherently paradoxical. People do not need to have "something to hide" in order to hide "something". What is hidden is not necessarily relevant, claims Mordini. Instead, he argues an intimate area which can be both hidden and access-restricted is necessary since, psychologically speaking, we become individuals through the discovery that we could hide something to others.
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Julian Assange stated "There is no killer answer yet. Jacob Appelbaum (@ioerror) has a clever response, asking people who say this to then hand him their phone unlocked and pull down their pants. My version of that is to say, 'well, if you're so boring then we shouldn't be talking to you, and neither should anyone else', but philosophically, the real answer is this: Mass surveillance is a mass structural change. When society goes bad, it's going to take you with it, even if you are the blandest person on earth."
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Ignacio Cofone, law professor, argues that the argument is mistaken in its own terms because, whenever people disclose relevant information to others, they also disclose irrelevant information. This irrelevant information has privacy costs and can lead to other harms, such as discrimination.
Google has been using ChromeOS to illegally spy on, monitor, and steal data from school students all around the world. There have already been many lawsuits, and they aren't going to stop until ChromeOS dies out completely.
Unfortunately, if your school enrolled you with Google Classroom, you are forced to use it to maintain a passing grade. The only ways to get away from it when you are enrolled at a school is to:
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Petition your school to provide an alternative solution
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Fail all classes that rely entirely on Google Classroom
Here are some privacy-based alternatives that have the features of Google Classroom:
These are recommended alternates, although there are not very many open source alternatives to Google Classroom right now, this is as good as you can get.
Khan Academy - Written in: JavaScript, Python, Objective-C, Go, Swift, ActionScript, Arduino, C, C#, CSS, Groovy, etc. - Open source (WARNING: links to YouTube and some other Google sites, uses Google for its site search engine (although you don't have to search the site this way) {RECOMMENDED, Based on over 5 years of experience with the site}
Khan Academy kids (Khan Academy for ages 12 and below) - Written in: JavaScript, Python, Objective-C, Go, Swift, ActionScript, Arduino, C, C#, CSS, Groovy, etc. - Open source (WARNING: links to YouTube and some other Google sites, uses Google for its site search engine (although you don't have to search the site this way)
Managebac - Written in: Unknown, HTML5, proprietary
These are other alternates, but are not as good, as they require payment for some features, and may not be open source
Edmodo - Written in: JavaScript, HTML5, proprietary $
Schoology - Written in: Unknown, HTML5, proprietary, $
Virtually - Written in: Unknown, HTML5, proprietary, $
Classlife - Written in: Unknown, HTML5, proprietary, $
GoConqr - Written in: Unknown, HTML5, proprietary, $
Classflow - Written in: Unknown, HTML5, proprietary, $
These are not recommended, as you have to pay to use them, but they aren't by Google.
Crammut - Proprietary, $$$
Show my homework - Proprietary, $$$
Blackboard learn - Proprietary, $$$
Sources: 1
The Google Graveyard (killedbygoogle.com) - a sorted list of the 224+ products Google has killed
Alphabet worker union - The new workers union at Google with over 800 members
Don't want to part with the dinosaur easter egg? This website has you covered
There are other alternates, just search for them.
Some fact checking is needed for this article
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Version 1 (Wednesday, February 17th 2021 at 4:11 pm)
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