Education International
information beyond what is needed for education’.120 One of the significant claims against Google is that its customer-oriented policy documents ‘disguise the business model’ and ‘persuade the reader to understand Google as a free public service, divorced from marketplace contexts and concerns’ (Lindh and Nolin 2016, p. 650). A study of various platforms used for ‘emergency remote teaching’ during the Covid-19 pandemic found that G Suite performed worst in relation to data protection regulations in Europe.121 While Google does not sell student data collected from G Suite or Classroom specifically for thirdparty advertising, this does not prevent it utilising personal information for the purposes of value-creating product development. Moreover, Google pursues brand allegiance and familiarisation, hoping the tens of millions of teachers and students who become familiar with Google products at school will continue to rely on Google out of school, thus generating the data from which Google derives most of its revenue. In this sense, the free to use G Suite has been described as training ‘Google consumers from infancy’, and as a ‘brand loyalty scheme, presented as an education revolution.’122
Amazon Amazon’s first notable entry into education was the provision of cloud storage for schools through its Amazon Web Services. However, it has subsequently made a number of education-related developments, including a marketplace where teachers can share or sell homeproduced lesson plans and resources, Prime subscriptions for students, grants for education projects, an EdStart incubator for edtech companies, Business for Education deals for quantity discounts, school Prime accounts, AWS Educate resources to ‘accelerate cloud-related learning’, and an LMS Integrated Store enabling educators to build course content and students to select the format that ‘fits their budget and study preferences’.123 During the pandemic Amazon produced guidance and resources for educators on remote instruction,124 promoted the digital learning platform EVERFI, of which Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is a major 120 Electronic Frontier Foundation. (2015). EFF v. Google, inc. EFF. https://www.eff.org/files/2015/12/01/ftccomplaintgoogleforeducation.pdf 121 Ducato, R. et al. (2020, June 4). Emergency remote learning: a study of copyright and data protection policies of popular online services. Kluwer Copyright Blog. http://copyrightblog.kluweriplaw.com/2020/06/04/emergencyremote-teaching-a-study-of-copyright-and-data-protection-policies-of-popular-online-services-part-ii/?doing_wp_ cron=1591282019.5066540241241455078125 122 Krein, A. (2020, June). The screens that ate school. The Monthly. https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2020/ june/1590933600/anna-krien/screens-ate-school 123 Amazon Education. (2020). Products and services. Amazon. https://www.amazon.com/gp/feature. html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000412651 124 AWS Educate. (2020). Supporting the rapid transition to remote learning. Amazon. https://aws.amazon.com/ education/remote-instruction-resources-for-educators/
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