© Alex Wong/Getty ImagesMississippi Attorney General Jim Hood (R) at a news conference in 2015.
Last year, Hood and Google wound down a court dispute over Hood's investigation into how Google handles certain kinds of online content, from illegal drug ads to pirated movies. E-mails from the 2014 Sony hack showed that Hood's investigation was spurred on, in part, by lobbyists from the Motion Picture Association of America.
Now Hood has a new bone to pick with the search giant. Yesterday, Hood filed a lawsuit (PDF) against Google in Lowndes County Chancery Court, saying that the company is gathering personal data on students who use Google's G Suite for Education, (previously called Google Apps for Education).
In a statement, Hood said that "due to the multitude of unclear statements provided by Google," his investigators don't know exactly what information is being collected.
"Through this lawsuit, we want to know the extent of Google's data mining and marketing of student information to third parties," Hood said. "I don't think there could be any motivation other than greed for a company to deliberately keep secret how it collects and uses student information."
The complaint claims that through a child's educational account, "Google tracks, records, uses and saves the online activity of Mississippi's children, all for the purpose of processing student data to build a profile, which in turn aids its advertising business." That gives Google an unfair edge over its competitors and violates Mississippi consumer protection law, say state lawyers.
More than half of Mississippi schools use Google products, according to Hood's office.
A Google spokesperson declined to comment on the matter. Google said that it stopped collecting any student data for advertising purposes in 2014.
In an interview with the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, Hood explained one investigative technique his office used. The investigators logged on to a laptop with a student's educational e-mail address and password and made some queries on YouTube. Then they logged out, went to a different browser, and logged in again.
"It started shooting ads at us dealing with the same query that that child had put in. So we knew that they were tracking that child," Hood told the Clarion-Ledger.
Hood's concerns mirror those from an Electronic Frontier Foundation complaint over Google Apps for Education, filed with the Federal Trade Commission in late 2015. That complaint pointed out that Google Chrome's "Sync" feature was enabled by default on educational laptops, meaning that Google could track, store, and data-mine student Internet use, although not for advertising purposes.
As of last month, the FTC had yet to take action on the EFF complaint.
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