Google plans to reach five million schoolchildren with a digital citizenship education program, but critics say it should be disqualified from doing so
The tech giant is positioning itself in schools as a trusted authority on digital citizenship at a moment when the company's data-handling practices are under growing scrutiny. Tweets: @samueljscott , @lam_barrett , @aprilaser , and @nytimes Tweets: Samuel Scott / @samueljscott : A better start would be to stop illegally collecting and using the data of children watching YouTube, as advocacy groups have charged. https://www.nytimes.com/... Lindsey Barrett / @lam_barrett : David Monahan's analogy is spot on— Google teaching kids about online privacy & safety is like Budweiser teaching them about drinking. It enables Google to shape how kids interpret threats, as well as signals of familiarity & safety, to its own benefit http://www.nytimes.com/... April Glaser / @aprilaser : “In the 1970s, General Motors circulated a free booklet in public schools that featured characters like Harry Hydrocarbon, who played down concerns about the health risks of industrial pollution and suggested that air pollution would soon not be a problem” http://www.nytimes.com/... @nytimes : Google is positioning itself in schools as a trusted authority on digital citizenship at a moment when the company's data-handling practices are under growing scrutiny http://www.nytimes.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Google is pitching itself to schools as a trusted guide on online safety even as advocacy groups charge that it illegally collects data from children watching YouTube — the same tension critics like Samuel Scott and Lindsey Barrett seize on, with David Monahan's Budweiser analogy framing the conflict of interest. The program at issue is the same Be Internet Awesome curriculum Google would go on to expand with media literacy activities the following year (six new activities added in 2019).
The dispute did not stay abstract: a parent activist's fight over an 8-year-old's YouTube account later turned Google's ubiquity in classrooms into a national debate in Denmark, showing how the school channel keeps colliding with the company's children's-data practices.
First-order effects
- Schools weighing the free curriculum must now judge whether the teacher of digital citizenship can be the company whose own child-data practices are under charge — a credibility problem for Google's outreach to five million students.
Second-order effects
- Regulatory pressure on the children's side of the business feeds back into the education play: the FTC probe over kids' videos on YouTube pushed the company to rethink that product, and any settlement or rule change raises the bar for what Google can claim in classrooms.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, children's-data enforcement becomes the gatekeeper for who gets to teach digital citizenship in schools — pushing platforms toward either verifiable separation between their education arms and their ad-data engines, or ceding that role to independent providers and regulators.
The trend: Big platforms are expanding into school-based digital literacy programs at precisely the moment their handling of children's data draws regulatory and parental pushback, making trust rather than content the battleground.