Mississippi's Attorney General is going after Google again, this time for its handling of students' personal data:
Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood is sparring with Google once more. Last year, Hood and Google wound down a court dispute over Hood's investigation into how Google handles certain kinds of online content, from illegal drug ads to pirated movies. E-mails from the 2014 Sony hack showed that Hood's investigation was spurred on, in part, by lobbyists from the Motion Picture Association of America.
Now Hood has a new bone to pick with the search giant. Yesterday, Hood filed a lawsuit (PDF) against Google in Lowndes County Chancery Court, saying that the company is gathering personal data on students who use Google's G Suite for Education, (previously called Google Apps for Education). In a statement, Hood said that "due to the multitude of unclear statements provided by Google," his investigators don't know exactly what information is being collected.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has criticized Google in the past for its tracking, storage, and data mining of student data.
Previously: Google Scolds MPAA on Cozy Relationship With the Mississippi Attorney General
Smoking Gun: MPAA Emails Reveal Plan To Run Anti-Google Smear Campaign
Google: First Amendment Doesn't Protect MPAA's Secrets
Google Quietly Takes Gag Off Mississippi AG After Wrecking Ads Probe
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 25 2017, @07:58AM
He might be a scumbag, but he's right about this
No, other people are right about this. He is opportunistically using it for his own ends. That means he'll drop it in a heartbeat if he thinks doing so will help his agenda. Not only that, he might even go so far as to endorse even worse behavior by a google competitor (i.e. one of his campaign donors which seem to be the MAFIAA). In the end he might make the privacy fight against google and the entire data-industrial complex worse.
We need trustworthy allies. They don't have to share our exact principles, but they at least have to value our principles. This guy seems like he'd be happy to throw our principles under the bus if it would help him.