New Mexico’s attorney general sued Google on Thursday, saying the tech giant used its educational products to spy on the state’s children and families.
Google collected a trove of students’ personal information, including data on their physical locations, websites they visited, YouTube videos they watched and their voice recordings, Hector Balderas, New Mexico’s attorney general, said in a federal lawsuit.
“The consequences of Google’s tracking cannot be overstated: Children are being monitored by one of the largest data mining companies in the world, at school, at home, on mobile devices, without their knowledge and without the permission of their parents,” the lawsuit said.
Over the last eight years, Google has emerged as the predominant tech brand in American public schools, outpacing rivals like Apple and Microsoft by offering a suite of inexpensive, easy-to-use tools.
Today, more than half of the nation’s public schools — and 90 million students and teachers globally — use free Google Education apps like Gmail and Google Docs. More than 25 million students and teachers also use Chromebooks, laptops that run on the company’s Chrome operating system, the lawsuit said.
In September, Google agreed to pay a $170 million fine to settle federal and New York State charges that it illegally harvested the personal data of children on YouTube.
The new lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the District of New Mexico, claimed that Google violated the federal Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. The law requires companies to obtain a parent’s consent before collecting the name, contact information and other personal details from a child under 13.
The lawsuit also said Google deceived schools, parents, teachers and students by telling them that were no privacy concerns with its education products when, in fact, the company had amassed a trove of potentially sensitive details on students’ online activities and locations.
Jose Castaneda, a Google spokesman, said the lawsuit’s claims were “factually wrong.”
