IDG Contributor Network: EFF files complaints against Google for tracking students

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) alleging that Google has been collecting and data mining personal information of students.

EFF made the discovery while researching its Spying on Students campaign, which launched yesterday.

While Google doesn’t explicitly track students for targeted advertising, EFF found that the ‘sync’ feature of Chrome browser was enabled by default. The sync features allows one to immediately get access to browsing history, bookmarks and setting by logging into that account. While it’s a very useful feature, it also means that all this information is stored on Google servers and as a result, EFF claims, “This allows Google to track, store on its servers, and data mine for non-advertising purposes, records of every Internet site students visit, every search term they use, the results they click on, videos they look for and watch on YouTube, and their saved passwords.”

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