Chrome and ChromeOS deemed not secure enough for schools in the Netherlands


Vincent Mannessier

July 25, 2022 at 3:55 p.m.

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The Dutch Ministry of Education has decided on a moratorium on the use of the browser Google Chrome in schools due to concerns about the security of students’ personal information.

The rather opaque storage and use of personal data by Google raises questions within the Dutch government. Its Minister of Education indeed thinks that it is difficult to verify that such an operation complies with the rules of the GDPR. He also wonders about the use of children’s personal data, and in particular about their potential resale to third parties for advertising purposes.

The Dutch government invites schools to do without Chrome and Chrome OS services

Google remains discreet about how data is collected on its Chrome browser, as well as where it is stored. For the Minister of Education, this is a real problem, especially in the case of children, so he decided to control the browser much more harshly in schools.

Concretely, the use of the various Chrome services is not prohibited in schools in the Netherlands, but must be subject to precautions. To avoid unnecessary data leaks, schools that continue to use Chrome should disable ad personalization, prevent machine translation and localization, or use a search engine other than Google.

The Dutch government has discussed its concerns with the Mountain View company, but also with giants like Zoom and Microsoft. Google has announced that a new version of Chrome and Chrome OS will be ready within a year, hence the moratorium until August 2023. If this new version is, as promised, more transparent and more secure, then the government could lift the restrictions. Note that in France, the CNIL issued a similar decision in February.

Source : BleepingComputer



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