Information Policy

Google is tracking students as it sells more products to schools, privacy advocates warn

By Andrea Peterson

In public classrooms across the country, the corporate name that is fast becoming as common as pencils and erasers is Google.

More than half of K-12 laptops or tablets purchased by U.S. schools in the third quarter were Chromebooks, cheap laptops that run Google software. Beyond its famed Web search, the company freely offers word processing and other software to schools. In total, Google programs are used by more than 50 million students and teachers around the world, the company says.

Spending watchdog questions roll out of Czech e-government ambitions

The Czech Republic has long had ambitions to be out there with the pioneers in e-government; linking up ministries and regional authorities and allowing citizens to transact more of their business over the computer rather than at office counters. But the roll out of those ambitions have hit many obstacles and some of these were highlighted on Monday in a report by the country’s public spending watchdog, the Supreme Audit Office.

It’s a battle for internet freedom

by Nikhil Pahwa

Among all the questions we’ve raised about Free Basics, if there was one that I would pick to ask Mark Zuckerberg, it would be this: Why has Facebook chosen the current model for Free Basics, which gives users a selection of around a hundred sites (including a personal blog and a real estate company homepage), while rejecting the option of giving the poor free access to the open, plural and diverse web?

Rough Consensus & Ambigious Compromise in Global Digital Politics

by Dr. Jovan Kurbalija
Founding director of DiploFoundation and Head of the Geneva Internet Platform.

The UN's ten-year review of World Summit on Information Society (WSIS) concluded successfully with the adoption of the WSIS+10 Resolution on 16 December 2015. The review process was a 'diplomatic sprint': in just a few months (effectively since September this year), negotiators managed to draft a complex and diplomatically delicate text.

X-Road Between Finland and Estonia

Estonia and Finland are the first two nations in Europe to develop a joint data exchange platform based on Estonia’s X-Road, which allows databases in both countries to interface, assist with cross-border services, and make e-services accessible to Estonian and Finnish citizens.