The Device in the Backpack
Your kid comes home from school, drops a backpack on the floor, and pulls out a Chromebook. They open it up, log in with their school Google account, and start doing homework. Maybe they write an essay in Google Docs. Maybe they watch a video their teacher assigned on YouTube. Maybe they Google something for a research project and get sidetracked watching a guy make a sword out of aluminum foil. Reasonable.
From where you’re sitting, it all looks the same. One device. One login. One kid doing school stuff.
But behind that single login, Google is running two completely different systems with two completely different sets of rules about what gets collected, who sees it, and what happens with it. Your kid’s school probably never explained this. And honestly? Most schools don’t fully understand it either.
Two Doors, One Hallway
Imagine your kid walks into school every morning through a hallway with two doors. The left door leads to a classroom with a teacher, a security camera pointed only at the whiteboard, and a strict policy: nothing your kid does in this room gets used for anything other than teaching. No one’s selling their answers. No one’s watching them to figure out what ads to show them later. It’s locked down.
The right door leads to a room that looks almost identical. Same desks. Same lighting. But this room has cameras everywhere — tracking what your kid looks at, what they click on, what they search for, how long they stare at something before moving on. And the footage doesn’t just go to the school. It goes to a company that uses it to build a profile of your kid’s habits, interests, and behavior.
Both rooms are inside the same building. Your kid walks between them dozens of times a day without ever noticing a door.
That’s basically how Google Workspace for Education works.
The Split: Core vs. Additional
Google divides its education services into two buckets. They call them Core Services and Additional Services. The names are boring. The difference between them is not.
Core Services are the school essentials — Gmail, Google Classroom, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Meet, and a few others. These are the apps teachers actually assign work through. In Core Services, Google says it doesn’t show ads, doesn’t use student data for advertising, and doesn’t use it to train AI models. There are real guardrails here. When it comes to the stuff your kid creates and submits for class, this side of the system is relatively buttoned up.
Additional Services are the consumer Google products — YouTube, Google Search, Google Maps, and others — that schools can optionally turn on for student accounts. These operate under Google’s standard privacy policy. The regular one. The same one that applies to your personal Google account. In Additional Services, Google collects search terms, videos watched, content interacted with, voice and audio information, and activity on third-party sites and apps. Ads can be shown, though Google says they won’t be personalized for K-12 students.
Read that last part again. Your kid’s school Google account, when it touches YouTube or Google Search, is operating under essentially the same data collection rules as every other Google user on the planet.
Why This Should Make You Squint
Here’s where it gets genuinely uncomfortable for parents.
When your kid’s school signed up for Google Workspace for Education, the school consented to Google’s data practices on your behalf — at least for Core Services. There’s a provision in a federal law called FERPA (the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) known as the “school official” exception. It lets schools share student data with third-party companies without asking parents first, as long as the company is performing a function the school would otherwise handle itself. Google qualifies. So your school said “yes” for you, and you may never have been asked.
An EFF survey found that roughly 80% of parents either received no written disclosure about edtech data collection or couldn’t remember whether they had. Eighty percent.
For Additional Services, Google’s own terms say schools need to get direct parental consent before turning them on for students under 18. But whether that consent actually reaches parents — and whether parents understand what they’re agreeing to — varies wildly from district to district.
And even in Core Services, Google still collects what it calls service data: device information, log data, location determined by GPS, IP address, nearby WiFi access points, and metadata about how services are used. Google says this is for security, service improvement, and “recommendations.” It’s the kind of data that’s technically separate from your kid’s essays and homework, but it paints a detailed picture of how, when, and where your kid uses the device.
The Part Most People Get Wrong
The most common thing parents tell me is some version of: “There are no ads, so Google isn’t making money off my kid.” And I get why that feels true. No ads, no problem. Right?
Not exactly.
Over 170 million students and educators use Google Workspace for Education worldwide. Roughly 93% of U.S. school districts purchased Chromebooks in 2025. Chrome is the only browser on a Chromebook. Google Drive is the default storage. Google Docs is the default word processor. Every login, every saved password, every file, every work habit — it’s all inside Google’s ecosystem. Students build years of muscle memory around these tools.
Whether or not Google shows your kid a single ad, those millions of students are growing up inside Google’s products. That has commercial value. A lawsuit filed in April 2025 (Schwarz v. Google) alleges that Google creates unique digital “fingerprints” for each student and tracks them across the internet — all without meaningful parental consent. Google moved to dismiss the case, and as of late 2025, it’s still pending. But the core allegation is worth sitting with: the product isn’t free because Google is generous. The product is free because your kid’s long-term relationship with Google’s ecosystem is the product.
Going Deeper: The Surveillance Stack
Google’s own data collection is only one layer. On top of it, many school districts install third-party monitoring software — tools like GoGuardian, Gaggle, and Securly — that track browsing history, search queries, email content, screen activity, and sometimes keystrokes. GoGuardian alone monitors approximately 27 million students across 10,000 schools.
Here’s the part that catches parents off guard: these tools often run 24/7, including when your kid brings the Chromebook home. Evenings. Weekends. Summer. If your kid is logged into their school account on that device, the monitoring doesn’t clock out just because the school day ended.
And if you — the parent — use that Chromebook to look something up while your kid’s account is logged in? That browsing may be visible to the monitoring software too. SURPRISE!
A Center for Democracy and Technology report found that this kind of always-on monitoring disproportionately affects lower-income students, Black students, and Hispanic students, because they’re more likely to rely on the school-issued Chromebook as their only computer. The surveillance net isn’t cast evenly. It lands heaviest on the kids who have the fewest alternatives.
Meanwhile, a 2023 RAND study found only “scant evidence” that AI-powered student monitoring tools actually reduce suicide rates or prevent school violence — which is the justification most districts use for installing them in the first place.
Where Things Stand Right Now
The legal landscape is shifting, slowly. The FTC finalized major updates to COPPA (the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act) that take full effect in April 2026. The new rules require opt-in consent for targeted advertising directed at kids, expand the definition of “personal information” to include biometric identifiers, and prohibit companies from holding onto kids’ data indefinitely.
But — and this is the big one — the FTC deliberately chose not to settle the question of whether schools can consent to data collection on parents’ behalf. That gray area? Still gray. The biggest loophole in the system is still wide open.
A separate lawsuit in Illinois (H.K. v. Google) already resulted in an $8.75 million settlement after Google allegedly collected voice models and face templates from students without proper consent. Payments started going out in February 2026. Individual checks were estimated at $30 to $100, which — if you’re keeping score — is roughly the price Google paid per student’s biometric data. Make of that what you will.
What This Means for Your Family
Your kid’s school Chromebook is not just a laptop. It’s a device that operates in two different privacy universes simultaneously, collects data you probably didn’t consent to, and may be watched around the clock by software your school never told you about.
None of this means you should panic. It means you should know what’s actually happening on the device in your kid’s backpack — because there’s a solid chance nobody explained it to you.
And now you know.