Onboarding "Loyalty for Life"

Google presentation slide - Exhibit in recent Google / Meta Court Case

Back in February I wrote a post called, "Turning Children Into Lifelong Customers". In it I wrote about how internal documents which were released as part of the recent Meta and Google court case,  highlighted that "Google viewed its work with schools as a way of turning children into lifelong customers" and how their growing presence in schools provided a "pipeline of future users." As both Google and Microsoft, are core products to the Hwb platform, I questioned whether Wales was focusing our learners in developing digital skills that were very much focused around these two products only, narrowing choice and creating vendor lock-in, questioned their history of data privacy practices and also whether Wales should be actively looking for non-US solutions based on the current scrutiny being placed on US tech by many governments. At what cost to our learners and to our schools and learners is the Google / Microsoft convenience?

It was therefore interesting to read this recent post from Proton, who are a company I actually mentioned in that post, "Students are being funneled into Google’s ecosystem." In the article, they also discuss the issue around data privacy concerns and a section called, Onboarding "loyalty for life". 

I really hope that the Welsh Government are starting to look closely at our relationship with both Google and Microsoft and whether using these products are really in the best interests of our learners.