Peer-reviewed article

THE ‘GOOGLISATION’ OF THE CLASSROOM: HOW DOES THE PROTECTION OF CHILDREN’S PERSONAL DATA FARE?

Kruakae Pothong, Louise Hooper, Sonia Livingstone, Ayça Atabey, Emma Day · 2 Jan 2025

Abstract

The use of education technologies (EdTech) in schools has rapidly expanded during COVID-19 due to remote learning requirements. Despite the diversity of EdTech products used in schools, only a handful, including Google Classroom, dominate children’s classrooms in the UK. The way these products operate and process data as part of teaching and learning may expose children to data protection risks with immeasurable consequences for children and their life prospects. This paper demonstrates how these data protection risks can manifest when children use Google Classroom for learning in principle and practice. We conducted a legal analysis of privacy policies and legal terms that applied to Google Classroom and other Google services accessible to children within the Google Classroom environment to demonstrate data protection risks in principle and a socio-technical investigation, using a web browser plug-in, called Lightbeam (for Firefox browser) and Thunderbeam (for Chrome browser), to capture the data flow throughout each child’s user journey, in practice. Through legal analysis of Google’s privacy policies, we identified various data protection risks, including the lack of transparency and purpose specification in data processing. We demonstrated how these risks, in principle, became more tangible in practice with scenarios in which each child’s user journey in and through Google Classroom can be exposed to third-party commercial tracking services. Drawing on an example of effective regulatory enforcement, we demonstrated how the risks to commercial exploitation of children’s personal data in education can be tamed.