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Blog

Education | June 11, 2018

As Google for Education tools enter classrooms across Canada, some parents are asking to opt out

Robert Beggs

Short take:

You either sign up, or you're left behind. So, what will Google do with all of the information that it holds on your children, if anything. And what protection will it commit to offering?

Excerpt:

Last October, Riaz Bassari's daughter came home from her elementary school class with a permission form for G Suite for Education: a set of cloud-based digital learning tools Google offers to schools for free.

The form, issued by the Greater Victoria School District in B.C., asked Bassari to agree that "my child's personal information will be used for a Google Apps for Education account."

Bassari, however, decided to not to sign the form, and soon discovered there was no alternative to Google's tools at his daughter's school.

"You either sign up or you're left out," Bassari told Spark.