EFF criticises Google for tying school search to AI features

The Electronic Frontier Foundation argues in a commentary that Google was right to face criticism for requiring American K-12 schools to enable AI as the price of continuing to use Google search. According to the piece, the company soon reversed course, separated the services and made them off by default, but also signalled that search will continue to function as another AI chatbot. The EFF describes the result as an ultimatum for educators: accept generative AI or leave Google.

The commentary recounts that in August Google activated its its Gemini chatbot on Google Classroom, reaching 150 million K-12 students. A few months later it offered a way to disable it, but administrators who used it would also have turned off search. Google then clarified that Gemini, Gemini notebook and Search will each have separate controls and be off by default. The EFF says the episode still shows a dominant firm pushing unwanted changes into classrooms, given its wider approach of building AI into search for everyone. It notes Google holds around 90 percent of search traffic and argues the company needs to protect that position against new AI tools.

The EFF calls for clear, persistent controls over AI features. It points to DuckDuckGo and Brave as examples of services with simple AI settings, and says unofficial tricks such as adding "-ai" to a query are quirks that could change at any time. It stresses that schools face high costs in switching providers, including contracts, staff retraining and migrating work, which makes fine-grained controls more important. Decisions about AI in classrooms, it says, belong to schools and teachers, not Google. A footnote discloses that DuckDuckGo is an EFF donor.