As Google For Education Tools Enter Classrooms Across Canada, Some Parents Are Asking To Opt-out | CBC Radio

Last October, Riaz Bassari’s daughter came home from her elementary school class with a permission form for G Suite for Education: a set of cloud-based digital learning tools Google offers to schools for free. The form, issued by the Greater Victoria School District in B.C., asked Bassari to agree that “my child’s personal information will be used for a Google Apps for Education account.” Bassari, however, decided to not to sign the form, and soon discovered there was no alternative to Google’s tools at his daughter’s school. “You either sign up or you’re left out,” Bassari…

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How Do Apple’s Screen Time And Google Digital Wellbeing Stack Up? | The Verge

Developer conference season is coming to an end with Apple’s WWDC this week, and the main takeaway is that between Google’s “Digital Wellbeing” and Apple’s “Screen Time,” the two biggest smartphone developers are taking some time to discourage smartphone overuse. On the surface, the two companies are taking very similar approaches with the tools they’re offering to present information to users. Apple and Google are both adding new dashboards, with options for more zoomed-out perspectives on how you’re spending your time, along with more granular views of how often you’re…

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Google’s Selfish Ledger Ideas Can Be Found In Its Patent Applications – The Verge

I trust by now we’ve all seen and been at least a little disturbed by The Selfish Ledger, the nearly 9-minute-long concept video from inside Google’s “moonshot factory” X labs. In the wake of it becoming public this week, Google quickly disavowed the video, claiming it was just a thought experiment “not related to any current or future products.” And yet, the company’s patent applications exhibit a mode of thinking that runs at least in parallel, if not on the exact same tracks, as The Selfish Ledger’s total data collection…

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