After reading the article on the city in Scandinavia that banned Google in the classroom, and listening to the CBC Spark podcast on the parent of a child in Victoria’s school district 61 who refused to sign the permission slip allowing his child to use Google classroom, I have the following thoughts.

I think that in trying to determine whether this is a good or bad thing, to have Google be such a dominant presence in education, we have to make the distinction between the impacts on the individual user of Google, and the larger societal impact.

When it comes to the negative impacts on the individual user, my feeling is that the concern over using Google is probably a little bit overblown. To understand why, we need to examine what the potential negative impacts on the individual could be.

It is clear that Google collects the personal information (name, email address, phone number) and the data (websites visited, items viewed, etc.) of its users. Why is this a problem? Google’s model, and that of all of these large tech companies, is to gather personal data in order to sell this information to third parties and/or advertisers so that adds can be customized to the user. Google claims that it does not do this with its education software. Maybe this is true, maybe it isn’t; there isn’t really any way to know, especially since the data of the individual leaves the country and there is little accountability for how it is used. But if your data gets sold to third parties or is used to targe advertising, is this really a problem? The fact that your data gets used to target advertising to you is not the end of the world; however, when it comes to your data being sold to third parties, this could be a potentially greater problem. This could be used to target you in various phishing scams, or could even leave you vulnerable to getting hacked. But all of our data is being used to these ends all of the time, and it is usually never more than a nuisance if precautions are taken.

But the fact that Google exports the data of its users to the US could be a bigger problem, since there, it is subject to different, laxer, privacy laws. There are concerns, for example, that one’s data could be swept up by agencies such as the NSA under anti-terrorism laws. But, as the podcast makes clear, this is unlikely to be a concern for the average user, and anyway, we have very similar legislation here in Canada.

If I don’t really buy the claim that use of technologies like Google is that much of problem for the average user, I am much less sanguine about the larger social impacts of allowing Google to take such a dominant position in education. To understand why, we have to try to divine the logic of why Google has striven to become such a dominant player in education. What does it get out of providing free software to schools? It says that it does not make money from the data, and that it makes little from the sale of Chromebooks and their servicing. Why is Google doing this then? We don’t know for sure, but we could speculate. Maybe Google is providing its services for free or at low cost as part of a long-term strategy to create a monopoly for itself in this sector. This is what tech companies often do. We have seen Netflix do this for example, or even Amazon. Offer very low-cost services (not even turning a profit in the short term) just in order to get a huge market share. Once you are in a dominant market position with no competitors, and users are dependent on you, you can start raising prices sharply to make back some profit. Another possibility is that by getting kids used to using Google products, there is a high likelihood that they will continue to use them as adults (this is mentioned in the podcast). It could also be that Google is using kids’ data to help develop their AI, which then becomes profitable on its terms.

How do we assess such possible consequences? Clearly the fact that we are participating in the development of a tech monopoly is bad. Monopolies are bad for all kinds of reasons: for the economy, for society, for consumers. But is the case of Google really any different from how we have participated, and are still participating in, the creation of Amazon’s monopoly, or Walmart’s? Is Google particularly bad? I don’t know.

Some even larger social consequences of using Google (and other types of tech in general) preoccupy me more than the particular case of Google. I have the following questions. If we are teaching kids the skills they need, and which the tech economy demands of its workers, are we not just responding to the dictates of the markets and private business, and thereby abandoning one of the primary objectives of education, which is to teach students to be critical of the society in which they live, including a society run by billon dollar tech companies? If we are training kids with these tech skills, will this not simply lower the value of these types of skills so that tech companies can lower the wages of these types of workers? The class structure of society will not have been altered, only that the requirements for access to each class position will have changed. Is tech in the classroom not participating in and facilitating Neoliberal education policy? If education is showing innovation and advancement as a result of free and cheap tech, does this let governments off the hook for not investing in education? To what extent are tech ‘skills’ taking the place of other more traditional skills at which the students of today are failing (literacy, for example)? Is tech even good for kids (i.e., does it contribute to the ADHD, the shortening of attention spans, mental health issues, etc.)? These larger questions about tech in general in the classroom actually preoccupy me a lot more than the specific issue of whether or not Google should be allowed in the classroom.