I agree with you. I get the impression that data aggregation&analysis is so deeply ingrained in Google company culture that it's entirely possible the responsible people truly believes nothing went wrong here.

From PBS Frontline's "United States Of Secrets" (part 2):

    LIZ FIGUEROA, (D) State Senator, CA, 1998-06: We walk into this room, and it’s myself
    and two of my staff— my chief of staff and one of my attorneys. And across from us
    was Larry, Sergey, and their attorney.

    All of a sudden, Sergey started talking to me. He said, “Senator, how would you feel
    if a robot went into your home and read your diary and read your financial records,
    read your love letters, read everything, but before leaving the house, it imploded?”
    And he said, “That’s not violating privacy.”

    I immediately said, “Of course it is. Yes, it is.” And he said, “No, it isn’t.
    Nothing’s kept. Nobody knows about it.” I said, “That robot has read everything.
    Does that robot know if I’m sad or if I’m feeling fear, or what’s happening?”
    And he looked at me and he said, “Oh, no. That robot knows a lot more than that.”

Of course, what that ridiculous robot analogy leaves out is that to be useful, something has to be reported back to Google; if the "implosion" prevented all of the data from returning to Google, there would be no point in sending the robot.

> Nobody knows about it.

This idea that no person knows about it is suspiciously similar to the word games the NSA plays with their claims of only needing a warrant once a human searches for something they already captured and stored.

Senator, if i was spending billions on robots to go to people homes and read their diaries and then explode before leaving, would you think there was some ulterior motive on me building those robots?

Or even more reasonably, if I were spending billions on such robots and they became a pervasive part of society, such that every family had such a robot regularly visiting their house and their daily routine was dependant on such robots...

Coupled with the fact that the function of said robots could be changed with a code push...

Doesn't that create an incredible opportunity for monetization and therefore risk for future abuse?

Just because we could provide a perfect search result to any query if we knew everything about a person (including their current thoughts) doesn't make enacting that a reasonable or good idea.

From everything I understand about Google culture from current and former Googlers I talk to, Google employees categorically believe data aggregation has no bearing on privacy concerns at all, and that there's fundamentally nothing even bordering on questionable in anything they do with it.

At the very least, Googlers :believe: they're 'doing the right thing', so they :believe: their marketing and their mottos, at least.

It's up to us to convince Google that it's wrong.

>a legally enforceable document whereby companies promise to refrain from collecting, using, or sharing students’ personal information

>This is not connected to any specific person

How can data not connected to any specific person be considered personal information? I mean what's bad here, the fact they collect it and then scrap the personal information? Or the fear they probably don't?

So you think that if law enforcement (from any country) knocks on Google's door, they will say "sorry, we can't provide that individual's data, because we collected it in aggregate"?

Of course not. Google still has that individual's data and can personally identify him. It's just their policy not to use that data when using machine learning and whatnot to get a result out of it.

Also, such "anonymized data" is never really anonymous, until Google starts using something like homomorphic enryption or client-side encrypted databases:

De Montjoye and colleagues examined three months of credit card transactions for 1.1 million people, all of which had been scrubbed of any PII. Still, 90% of the time he managed to identify individuals in the dataset using the date and location of just four of their transactions. By adding knowledge of the price of the transactions, he increased “reidentification” (the academic term for spotting an individual in anonymized data) to 94%. Additionally, women were easier to reidentify than men, and reidentification ability increased with income of the consumer.

https://hbr.org/2015/02/theres-no-such-thing-as-anonymous-da...

The problem is that Google gets that data in the first place and stores it - indefinitely. If someone hacks Google it could also get that data. And what's worse, instead of making it a company priority to "fix" this, it doesn't seem to care very much, even when the solutions could be within reach with a little more R&D:

Lloyd made his pitch, proposing a quantum version of Google’s search engine whereby users could make queries and receive results without Google knowing which questions were asked. The men were intrigued. But after conferring with their business manager the next day, Brin and Page informed Lloyd that his scheme went against their business plan. “They want to know everything about everybody who uses their products and services,” he joked.

http://www.wired.com/2013/10/computers-big-data/

I think Chrome Sync does support client-side encryption. I set an encryption password, and it seems to be client-side.

> It's just their policy not to use that data when using machine learning and whatnot to get a result out of it.

So Google is like a child that wants to eat candy, has candy, but doesn't eat it?

Of course they're using all the data they can, to the extent they can.

They're just telling us there's no reason to worry, while they feed their data to the NSA's surveillance machinery etc.

You see, Google is not the only "child with candy". Then there's the US government, and that kid has a ravenous appetite.

That's pretty accurate. Google seems to have a huge fascination with collecting data, refuses to let us opt out of most of that data collection (without opting out of those services entirely), and then just expects us to 'trust them' that they aren't using it inappropriately.

"Trust we're doing this" is basically what "Pledge" means.

>except when needed for legitimate educational purposes or if parents provide permission.

Lowering a broken page's rank so that students only see working pages helps their educational experience.

I'm not saying I completely agree with the argument, but it isn't a bold face lie.

EFF complains about students’ personal information Google talks about stuff it does after completely removing information about individual users.

summary of the summary: Google tracks students the same as they track you, regular users. To the fully extent the law allows and then some on the gray line.