Google and Students: The Quest for Revenue
January 7, 2016
The Alphabet Google thing is getting more focused in its quest for revenue in the post desktop search world. I read “Google Is Tracking Students As It Sells More Products to Schools, Privacy Advocates Warn.” I remember the good old days when the Google was visiting universities to chat about its indexing of the institutions’ Web sites and the presentations related to the book scanning project. This write up seems, if Jeff Bezos’ newspaper is spot on, to suggest that the Alphabet Google thing is getting more interested in students, not just the institutions.
I read:
More than half of K-12 laptops or tablets purchased by U.S. schools in the third quarter were Chromebooks, cheap laptops that run Google software…. But Google is also tracking what those students are doing on its services and using some of that information to sell targeted ads, according to a complaint filed with federal officials by a leading privacy advocacy group.
The write up points out:
In just a few short years, Google has become a dominant force as a provider of education technology…. Google’s fast rise has partly been because of low costs: Chromebooks can often be bought in the $100 to $200 range, a fraction of the price for a MacBook. And its software is free to schools.
Low prices. Well, Amazon is into that type of marketing too, right? Collecting data. Isn’t Amazon gathering data for its recommendations service?
My reaction to the write up is that the newspaper will have more revelations about the Alphabet Google thing. The security and privacy issue is one that has the potential to create some excitement in the land of online giants.
Stephen E Arnold, January 7, 2015
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