Privacy is Hard

Recently Google quietly made a change to include “Chrome Sync” in the list of “Core” tools in gSuite for Education. Chrome Sync provides the ability (when you sign in to Chrome or by default on a Chromebook), to sync Chrome data to your Google Account and to any other supported ChromeOS/browser that is signed in. […]

I have previously written about gSuite for Education and the number of non-core services that are enabled by default when a school sets up their domain. I have not had a chance to retest what services are still enabled by default when creating a new domain, but I did want to acknowledge that Google recently notified existing […]

This weekend Google rolled out a change to Google.com search to add a “personal” tab described by cmswire as… “results come directly from your Google accounts. According to reports, personal ads may also appear in these results. The tab can be found under the ‘More’ option on the search page and surfaces everything related to a […]

Earlier this month, New York Times columnist Natasha Singer wrote How Google Took Over the Classroom, a detailed look at the rise of Google in primary and secondary education. (Also worth a listen is the NPR interview on All Sides with Ann Fisher). The article did not address Google at the post-secondary level, but Joshua Kim of […]

[Updated: as Doug Levin notes, Google was warned about the potential of this problem in 2011] On May 3rd, a small percentage (~.1%) of Google users were hit with a sophisticated phishing attack (it used at least 13 different application “clientIds”) . The phishing took the form of a link that directed users to an application […]