
What’s stored in a school Google Drive account? - DyslexicAtheist
https://web.archive.org/web/20180919124648/https://missourieducationwatchdog.com/whats-stored-in-your-school-google-drive-account-you-might-be-surprised/
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RandallBrown
> “My voice to text was being stored as well as any search my kids did, and I
> could say ‘sure my daughter was searching on Google,’ but my phone uses
> Safari. When I used my texting app on my iPhone, it recorded my voice, as
> well as typing out the words and saving it on my Google Drive,” said Brette
> Hay, the Ely’s daughter and a teacher at Pershing Middle School.

If it's possible to get voice recordings out of the iMessage app from a
separate app (shouldn't be possible from an iMessage app either) this would be
a major security hole and Apple would be _pissed_ at google for doing it.

This is almost certainly a misunderstanding of what's actually going on.

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Lifesnoozer
The texting app might not be iMessage

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Rjevski
It was most likely WhatsApp, which as far as I know allows backing up to
Google Drive.

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drdaeman
iOS WhatsApp backs up to iCloud. Don't see any Google Drive option.

~~~
fergbrain
Correct, it’s an Android-only option:
[https://faq.whatsapp.com/en/android/28000019/?category=52452...](https://faq.whatsapp.com/en/android/28000019/?category=5245251)

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zenexer
This sounds like someone who doesn’t have an understanding of how the services
they’re using are designed to interact with each other. This is a problem, but
it’s not specific to Google: it’s difficult, if not impossible, to ensure that
your average user actually understands how these services are meant to work.
As the user starts to realize how integrated these services really are, it
causes a level of confusion and paranoia; humans fear what they don’t
understand. This, in turn, causes them to misunderstand how the services truly
integrate; they feel helpless and don’t understand just how much control they
have over their own data.

Many of these claims are outright false because they’re technologically
infeasible and would require the exploitation of security vulnerabilities.
Companies like Google are constantly having their apps inspected by hobbyists
and professionals alike; there’s no way that’d go unnoticed for any length of
time, plus it’s nearly impossible to begin with.

In short: a parent has just discovered the internet. They’re scared, paranoid,
and confused. This is, unfortunately, quite normal.

There are legitimate privacy concerns regarding Google’s collection of data,
but none of them are raised in this article. It’s a misunderstanding at best
and outright propaganda at worst.

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kerng
Parents complain about auto-sync of passwords, and browser history, past
searches and things like that. They would like more control of what's
stored/synced by default. It's not as benign as you describe it, especially
when it comes to children.

~~~
zenexer
It doesn't auto-sync without your permission; you have to request that the
browser save your password. If you want to save passwords locally without
syncing, it's trivial to disable. You can additionally encrypt the passwords
with a master password so that Google doesn't have access to them.

Auto-syncing of passwords is a core feature of every modern browser. Safari
does it, Firefox does it, Vivaldi does it, Edge does it, Opera does it, and,
of course, Chrome does it.

Want control over your child's account? Google has something for that:
[https://families.google.com/familylink/](https://families.google.com/familylink/)

Want the school to manage it for you? That's exactly what G Suite is.

Edit: The problem here is ignorance. It's easy to demonstrate that it's
possible to control all the data about which this parent is concerned. Sure,
there's data they can't easily control, but they make no mention of that. Your
interests, demographics, everything else Google infers about you... you can't
fully control that, and that's what parents should be worried about--not
password syncing.

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crazygringo
This suggests their main complaint is about logging into Chrome Sync with the
EDU account, where expected behavior _would_ be to store and sync history and
passwords. (And if you don't keep separate Chrome profiles, obviously that
would include everyone using the computer.)

And then they talk about saving voice recordings and transcriptions from their
phone messages... I can only guess they did something like configured WhatsApp
to store backups on Drive and forgot they had?

EDU accounts should be treated like work accounts: use them only for EDU- or
work-related things. Don't visit your bank's website and save the password to
Chrome when logged into syncing to your daughter's school account.

On the other hand, asking students, parents, and faculty to fully understand
the Chrome login-and-sync model, and how it differs from website logins, may
be asking too much. And it can be hard to tell the difference between Chrome
sign-in and Apps sign-in, or to realize that signing out of one won't
necessarily sign you out of the other.

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jchw
I don't understand. What they are describing sounds like Chrome syncing. But
you can certainly install Google Drive's sync client without using
Chrome/Chrome syncing. Is this a new thing?

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judge2020
They must have signed into Chrome, but Chrome will explicitly tell the user if
their data will be accessible to the GSuite administrator[0] so this is likely
on them for not fully reading this popup or forgetting about it.

0: [https://judge.sh/YILh0ozLX5.png](https://judge.sh/YILh0ozLX5.png)

~~~
Notre1
Being accessible to the G Suite administrator is understandable, but this is
saying that anyone with an account on the school's G Suite plan could see the
passwords for any other user.

This has to be something where the admins changed some default setting to
change the default security on everything in G Suite, so that all other school
accounts could have access to it.

Maybe someone intended to set it up so that all google sheets and docs were
shared among everyone on the plan, but didn't realize the change they made
applied to other things that got synced to G Suite, like Chrome sync
passwords?

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crottypeter
From my reading of it, they are saying that all passwords saved in the browser
(potentially all users of the home PC or mobile phone) get associated with the
google account but _not_ that all users of the school system can see each
others passwords.

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Bedon292
I wonder if some of this is cause by not logging out from everything? You can
probably log out of gmail, but not the chrome browser and not realize it. And
the browser will still record everything. Or the opposite.

I am a bit curious about some of the claims about sync on iPhone. I don't have
one, but is it even possible for another app to reach the internals of Safari?
I would think that is locked down. Or are they logged into their google
account in the browser? As for google getting the voice and text from a
messaging app, how would that be possible unless its an actual google app?

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edtechstrats
More context for this story here: [https://www.pogowasright.org/back-to-
school-revolt-in-spring...](https://www.pogowasright.org/back-to-school-
revolt-in-springfield-employees-balk-over-using-google-drive-as-evidence-of-
massive-privacy-breach-mounts/)

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GlenTheMachine
The academic Google Drive does some weird stuff. I let my daughter access her
school's G-Suite on my work laptop once last year. For weeks afterwards
whenever I tried to surf to certain websites I would automatically get
redirected to the school's web logon page. Which tells me that at the very
least some Google software was tracking my web usage.

I basically had to do a full reinstall of the browser to stop it. It wasn't a
case where she didn't log out.

~~~
chrismeller
So it set a cookie that indicated that on Google properties it should redirect
you to the right place to log in, not take you to the main Google login?

I mean maybe it's not as clear as it should be, and maybe it should remove
that cookie if you log out (ehhh...), and it should probably be easier to get
rid of all of that... but we're hardly talking the conspiracy of the decade
here.

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justjash
Weird since my child is in this school district. They also don't mention much
about the fact that every child (as far as I know) has a Chromebook provided,
so I doubt this would be a common thing where kids are logging into Google
Drive on another PC at home.

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beauzero
A lot of school districts allow the chromebooks to go home with the kids and
there are ways to manage DNS filtering and chrome app management for those
chromebooks. It is very attractive for cash strapped school districts or for
eRate projects (every 5 years). G Suite is used by a lot of schools and a lot
of teachers do the G Suite educational certifications as well.

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veritas718
that was not even google drive, but her myactivity page.. she logged into
google when using the app. the stuff is in her account, and she looked at it.
and then it was a local fox story.

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fermigier
[https://web.archive.org/web/20180919124648/https://missourie...](https://web.archive.org/web/20180919124648/https://missourieducationwatchdog.com/whats-
stored-in-your-school-google-drive-account-you-might-be-surprised/)

(Not sure if there is a legitimate reason this has been taken out)

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jwilk
The original page ([https://missourieducationwatchdog.com/whats-stored-in-
your-s...](https://missourieducationwatchdog.com/whats-stored-in-your-school-
google-drive-account-you-might-be-surprised/)) works for me.

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jstanley
I'm just seeing a 500 error.

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_bax
Antivirus blocked page...

