Content-type: text/html Downes.ca ~ Stephen's Web ~ “Your Child Is the Product”: The Cost of Opting Out of Edtech

Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

This article came out the same day as another on Why I'm Done With Chrome, which complains about the Google browser's new policy of automatically signing you in when you land on Google services. There's no opting out with Chrome, according to the article, and there's a high cost to students who opt out of G Suite for Education: "it goes without saying their child doesn't have a personal Gmail account. They don't use Google Docs, don't have a YouTube account, don't store files on Google Drive, don't use Hangouts, and certainly don't use apps downloaded from Google Play." The reason (in my view) why this becomes such a hardship is because, as I've found, the bad actors - the spammers and the spoofers and the scammers - make it impossible to run these services outside the major silos. Even something as simple as email is now very difficult to manage outside the major service providers.

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

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Last Updated: Apr 18, 2024 8:06 p.m.

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