[LINK] A Danish City Built Google Into Its Schools—Then Banned It

[Kim Holburn]

https://www.wired.com/story/denmark-google-schools-data/

An 8-year-old’s YouTube snafu—and one unlikely parent activist—sparked a nationwide debate on the tech giant’s ubiquity and handling 
of children’s data.

The small Danish city of Helsingør is not a place usually in national news headlines. Until now, most visitors come here to catch 
the ferry to nearby Sweden or to visit the castle where Shakespeare’s famous tragedy Hamlet was set. But the news crews arrived with 
the start of the new school term in August, to capture the chaos caused when local schools banned Google.

Google’s education products—its Chromebook laptops and school software—are deeply embedded in Denmark’s education system. Around 
half of the country’s schools use Google, and some students in Helsingør get their first Chromebook at the age of 6. So when 
Helsingør banned those products on July 14, the result was widespread disruption when schools reopened the following month. Some 
local children complained they were so unused to pen and paper they couldn’t read their own handwriting. Denmark’s data protection 
regulator found that local schools did not really understand what Google was doing with students’ data and as a result blocked 
around 8,000 students from using the Chromebooks that had become a central part of their daily education.

This chaos had its roots back in August 2019, when one local 8-year-old approached his father with a problem. One of his classmates, 
he said, had used the 8-year-old’s YouTube account to write a “very rude” comment under another person’s video, and the son was 
panicking about the possible consequences. He was worried he would be punished for harassment or become the target of an online 
revenge campaign.

His father, Jesper Graugaard, was initially confused; he hadn’t set up a YouTube account for his son, and he hadn’t given the school 
permission to create one either. His family was “proudly analog”; his three children don’t have their own smartphones. So when 
Graugaard realized that his son (who he declines to name) had a YouTube account that publicly listed his full name, school, and 
class, he was shocked and immediately contacted his son’s school. Staff there, he says, tried to wave the issue away as a mistake 
with private filters they could easily fix. Google declined to comment on the specifics of this case but said schools’ IT staff are 
typically in charge of which Google services students can access.

But Graugaard was not reassured. This stay-at-home dad—who had never before been involved in any kind of activism—embarked on a 
three-year campaign to fix what he considered to be a major flaw in the relationship between the Danish public school system and 
Google. It was his official complaint to Denmark’s data protection regulator, Datatilsynet, in December 2019 that inspired the 
Google ban in Helsingør. And his constant efforts to speak to local media and politicians have helped create one of the biggest 
debates ever to take place in Denmark about how to protect Danish data and have unleashed growing skepticism about the role of 
American companies in Europe’s public sector.

The Google ban was partly imposed because the data protection regulator discovered Helsingør never carried out a full risk 
assessment for Google’s school products before using them, as required under Europe’s GDPR privacy law, according to Allan Frank, IT 
security specialist at Datatilsynet. Schools that were plunged into chaos by the ban, however, received a respite on September 8, 
when the ban was suspended for two months, allowing students to keep using their Chromebooks while Helsingør and Google negotiate 
what happens next.


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When Graugaard started his campaign, he was not worried about Google products specifically. “My concern was when I put a child into 
public school, private personal data is not allowed to go public without my consent,” he says. “I'm just a dad. I didn't understand 
the seriousness of the case.” But he now finds Google’s involvement in Danish public schools sinister, and he wants the company out 
of the system. “Everything [children do] in school is in the cloud, via Workspace, which means everything they write in their 
machine is sent to Google,” he says. “We have given Google access to a whole generation.”


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-- 
Kim Holburn
IT Network & Security Consultant
+61 404072753
mailto:kim at holburn.net   aim://kimholburn
skype://kholburn  - PGP Public Key on request