GAFE is already being used in primary and secondary schools in at least 11 towns and cities around the country, out of 2,454 municipalities in total. In 2015, the government of Baja California decided to approve its use throughout the state’s education system. GAFE is now about to be launched in at least five more municipalities.

The “sales pitch” is that introducing technology tools makes the teaching process more efficient and improves students’ performance.

The initiative, which already has 50 million users around the world, integrates Gmail, Calendar, Classroom, the virtual hard disk, Drive, video platform YouTube, word processing programmes, contacts and messaging into a single package. It also offers unlimited Gmail and Google Drive storage.

The package of technology tools, also used in Peru, Bolivia, Brazil and Argentina and soon to be launched in Colombia and Chile, includes the Chrome Sync function, allowing account holders to use Chromebook or Chrome browser to access their most visited pages, applications and bookmarks.

“Although it says there is no advertising for children and it does not sell data, information can be shared on the orders of a court or used in big data. This flow of data is becoming a very powerful tool for companies like Google when it comes to behaviour and buying trends. “The business is the data,” points out Juan Martín García, executive director of the children’s rights network Red por los Derechos de la Infanciain Mexico, in an interview with Equal Times.

The aims of the “Baja California goes Google” project, according to its website, is to “promote education through the Google Apps for Education tools for students and teachers, encouraging them to embrace and use this technology in the education process” and “to create educational programmes that support, foster and give impetus to the vision of the new generation of young people, to make the most of their different ways of thinking and to give them the opportunities and the tools needed to better prepare them for the world of work”.

With this initiative, ensures the site, “the teachers will be better equipped to enrich their classes and to awaken the interest of their pupils, with a view to improving the educational experience of the new generations”.

 
Masses of data for Google, with the user’s consent

The GAFE proposal is free of advertising, the site affirms, and free of charge. But the bargaining chip is the massive volume of data that users generate through their searches and viewing of videos.

The corporation’s Privacy Policy, updated on 19 August 2015, acknowledges the collection of data and data mining through its powerful algorithms, such as Google Analytics. That is why the phrase “Google knows us better than we know ourselves” is not a well-known hyperbole.

When users create a Google account, they supply information such as their name, email, telephone or credit card number. At the same time, the company pries into the make of the user’s device, the operating system, its unique markers, and information on the mobile network. In addition, it collects browsing data, telephone data such as outgoing calls, the times and dates of the calls, their duration and their nature, as well as the IP address, type of browser and geolocation.

The use of the tools implies that the users have accepted the privacy policy. Otherwise, they have to notify Google of the limitations they wish to place on the handling of their data.

“We use the information we collect from all of our services to provide, maintain, protect and improve them, to develop new ones, and to protect Google and our users. We also use this information to offer you tailored content,” states the document.
Google indicates that it asks for the data holder’s consent before using information for a purpose other than those set out in the privacy policy. In addition, it ensures that it does not share data with companies, organizations or individuals outside of Google unless it has the user’s consent to do so, but recognises that it provides personal information to its affiliates or “other trusted businesses or persons” for processing.

“We may share non-personally identifiable information publicly and with our partners – like publishers, advertisers or connected sites,” it states.

But this is where the problem starts, given the relative ease with which user profiles from social networks can be unanonymised, as demonstrated by a 2010 study by experts from the Technology Universities in Austria and California and the Eurocom Institute in France.

And in spite of all this, the project is not on the radar of teachers’ organisations in Mexico. Judith Ríos, secretary of the Baja California education workers’ union Sindicato Estatal de Trabajadores de la Educación en Baja California, in the city of Mexicali – some 2,190 km northwest of Mexico City – told Equal Times that she was unaware of the initiative.

“We have not been informed. It is a very sensitive issue. No one knows what the impact could be of data falling into the hands of other people. Even if privacy is protected, the data is all over the place. We are talking about primary school children. This is very dangerous,” says the teacher, who has been in the profession for 33 years and has been the head of the trade union branch in her city since October 2015.

The Education System of Baja California and the INAI have not mentioned the potential threat to student privacy. And neither of the two institutions agreed to respond to Equal Times’ question.

David Medel, head of the Centro de Formación Escolar Banting, a private school in the south of Mexico City, defends the use of GAFE and plays down the risks.

“We needed an integrated system to facilitate the management of students and processes. We studied the best option and looked at various applications. GAFE is a system that is very easy to implement and you can do it yourself, without being an IT specialist or having a background in technology. A key factor in our decision was that it should be free. GAFE covered those needs,” he explained to Equal Times.

He quotes the example of Classroom, “which makes communication between the student and the teacher and between the parents and the teacher more efficient,” and Google Forms, through which “exams can be posted online, distributed to the students, and their responses can then be scored by the application”.

Founded in 1994, Colegio Banting teaches around 700 students ranging from pre-primary to secondary level. The school adopted GAFE in 2014, has been using Google Classroom since 2014 and is planning to introduce Google Chromebook laptops at secondary school level for the 2016-2017 cycle. Around 600 people, between the students, teachers and administrative staff, are using GAFE.

When the school’s director read the privacy statement, he did not see any “worrying elements”, he points out. “We have an administrative panel to delete accounts if a student leaves the school. It is up to each user to decide whether he or she wants to create a Google+ (social network) profile,” ensures Medel.

This education institute is among the case studies presented as a GAFE success story. The school uses Drive, the cloud-based virtual hard drive, as its central repository for all the school’s information, including the lunch menus, course descriptions and resources shared in various file formats.

Its benefits include training students to use modern technology tools, improving communication between teachers and students as well as students and administrative teams, helping teachers and parents to keep track of the students’ work and progress, bringing down costs and using less paper.

 
Unresolved issues and cases opened

When GAFE was launched in 2012, the corporation began spying on the users’ emails to generate targeted advertising, which Google admitted, in March 2013, in court proceedings in the United States.

The nine plaintiffs accused Google of creating surreptitious profiles with the information obtained from scanning emails for ad targeting purposes. They also accused Google of practices that violate federal and state laws on intercepting communications and privacy rights, in addition to violating the principle of non-commercial use of student data.

In May 2014, the parties reached a confidential extrajudicial settlement. That same month, Bram Bout, director of Google for Education, announced that the company was no longer scanning its users’ emails.

But this did not dissipate the concerns over GAFE. “When you use Chromebook, you can only access it with a Google account. The company monitors all the searches, keeps a record, builds profiles and uses them for its own business purposes. Even if it’s not for advertising, it makes money out if it,” maintains Jeff Gould, president of SafeGov, a forum for technology experts and providers dedicated to protecting user privacy, in a telephone interview with Equal Times.

The lawsuits against the company did not stop there. On 1 December, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which oversees rights in the digital world, filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), to investigate and bring an end to such practices.

The organisation launched the “Spying on Students” campaign, to raise consciousness about the privacy risks presented by school-issued electronic devices and programmes. The EFF points out that when pupils enter their GAFE accounts, personal information (data on the use of non-educational Google services) is collected, stored and used by the corporation for its own benefit, beyond those linked to authorised education or school purposes.

The Chrome Sync feature, built into the device, allows the multinational to record and make use of the students’ entire browsing history and other data for its own benefit.

EFF is requesting an investigation and the initiation of proceedings for injunctive relief to require Google to destroy all student data collected, stored or used, and to stop the corporation repeating these practices in the future.

In response to the complaint, Jonathan Rochelle, director of Google Apps for Education, denied, on 2 December, on the GAFE blogspot, that the company is violating students’ privacy and stated that their goal is “to ensure teachers and students everywhere have access to powerful, affordable and easy-to-use tools for teaching, learning and working together. We have always been firmly committed to keeping student information private and secure.”

In addition to this complaint, four students from the University of California, Berkeley, sued Google on 28 January in a U.S. court, accusing the company of violating the Electronic Communications Privacy Act by scanning their emails to generate targeted advertising profiles, despite ensuring the educational institute that it would not do so.

 
Mexican experts urge authorities to intervene

García, Gould and Ríos are urging the authorities to intervene to protect students’ privacy.

“The power of this information for public policy decision-making is immense, but it does not serve this purpose, it only serves the interests of the company. Big data should not be the property of companies, and this should be respected in digital rights. It should not be just a corporate-controlled private business, but should serve the public interest. There needs to be external auditing to guarantee that children’s safety is protected. There needs to be a preventative role,” insists García.

Gould recommends that the Mexican government should examine the complaint of the EFF and even cooperate with the FTC to study the use of Google products: “These matters should be carefully investigated to see if students’ privacy is protected and Google should be asked to change its conditions,” suggests the expert.

Ríos is calling for “very thorough intervention”.

“We cannot leave the information of so many people at risk. Technology is not neutral,” she emphasises.

Meanwhile, Medel, from the Colegio Banting, envisions closing the technological circle with the massive use of Chromebooks. “They are going to be more connected at home, and we guarantee they will not see improper content. We want to work towards creating a safer world with Google technology,” he explains.

For Google, the massive introduction of GAFE is also a business strategy, as it supplants the products of its competitor, Microsoft, which has long been a major provider of federal and state governments, and which does charge users for its tools.