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Denmark bans Gmail and Co from schools due to privacy concerns

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Re: Denmark bans Gmail and Co from schools due to privacy concerns

#171

Post by EUROCARE »

lrvick wrote: post #169
EUROCARE wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's cool, but you can't give out mailboxes for free like you can give away computers. It needs to run somewhere, the servers maintained by someone. Do you have a better solution than Gmail? I know only about Microsoft, is that even an improvement?

I host email for hundreds of people with a $10/mo VPS. Schools classically self hosted their network services and they can do so again. It is a good opportunity to mentor future sysadmins too.

It's great that you do, but that's not a typical school admin skillset. People who know this have zero reason to slave for a school.

> Schools classically self hosted their network services

Back when encryption wasn't even needed, hackers were a curiosity and deliverability wasn't a concern. This is never coming back. School is a very important part of people's lives (parents, children, teachers, other staff), deliverability and security must be perfect.

Schools also manage loads of very private data. As a parent, I don't want the school admin to touch it with a 10-meter pole, I want them to use a managed service that they can't screw up even if they tried very hard (and sometimes school admins look at data themselves - the less opportunity they have the better).

> It is a good opportunity to mentor future sysadmins too.

The point is to have working email that everyone can rely on, not to groom kids/teachers to become sysadmins. It's better for everyone if the school admin focuses on solving things no one else can solve (e.g. handing out the free computers and installing Linux on them) rather than wasting time tinkering with email hosting for public money.

Re: Denmark bans Gmail and Co from schools due to privacy concerns

#172

Post by lrvick »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #158
lrvick wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Schools have no place supporting or teaching proprietary software in the first place. They should teach concepts using publicly available software and sponsor students who wish to patch bugs that impact school operations.

"Schools have no place supporting or teaching proprietary software in the first place. They should teach concepts using publicly available software" Schools teach using proprietary books, and every piece of equipment in a school, from a projector to a powertool is proprietary too. I am not against the idea, but I am just pointing out it gors against the grain of current customs and norms.

I specifically said software. Appliances like a drill or a projector can be readily replaced with any other drill or projector. These do not have anywhere near the privacy and lock-in problems of proprietary software.

Re: Denmark bans Gmail and Co from schools due to privacy concerns

#173

Post by 0xedd »

EUROCARE wrote: post #152
spookie wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it isn't, it should be. School is obligatory, we really shouldn't employ commercial products in schools to begin with. In Portugal, some years ago, kids were given computers with a Linux distro pre-installed for *free*, and LibreOffice was used as a word processor replacement. Argentina did the same thing, hell there were others too.

That's cool, but you can't give out mailboxes for free like you can give away computers. It needs to run somewhere, the servers maintained by someone. Do you have a better solution than Gmail? I know only about Microsoft, is that even an improvement?

You can Google free email services rather than use bing.

Protonmail is one. Free version includes much more than what a student needs. Students can sign up themselves.

Re: Denmark bans Gmail and Co from schools due to privacy concerns

#174

Post by andylynch »

EUROCARE wrote: post #160
Schroedingersat wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Textbooks should really be public domain. They're paid for by public money anyway, it's just we currently also pay 10x the cost to make them directly to elsevier or pearson.

What do you mean, they're paid for by public money? I don't think that's true at all - at least in EU. Some of them get public donations (to support the independence of the authors, usually), and some of them are written by people paid by a university, but there's so much more completely independently funded textbooks...

I think GP means schools buying the books are typically using public funds to do so.

Re: Denmark bans Gmail and Co from schools due to privacy concerns

#175

Post by maltyr »

EUROCARE wrote: post #160
Schroedingersat wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Textbooks should really be public domain. They're paid for by public money anyway, it's just we currently also pay 10x the cost to make them directly to elsevier or pearson.

What do you mean, they're paid for by public money? I don't think that's true at all - at least in EU. Some of them get public donations (to support the independence of the authors, usually), and some of them are written by people paid by a university, but there's so much more completely independently funded textbooks...

I might be reading into the previous poster's comment more than originally intended, but basically, most US textbooks, are basically written for use by US public schools. They are effectively being paid for by public money, because the only customer buying those textbooks are public schools funded by public money.

> For the years ended March 31, 2020 and 2019, K-12 traditional print represented 59% ($353 million) and 63% ($357 million) of total K-12 revenue, respectively.

> In the K-12 market in the United States,...We sell our learning solutions directly to school districts across the United States.

This is less true at the university level, since students typically have to pay for their own textbooks, but scholarships, grants, and loans, and other public money sources that go to students are used to cover those costs.

Source: McGraw Hill's 2020 Annual Report https://www.annualreports.com/HostedData/AnnualReports/PDF/N...

Re: Denmark bans Gmail and Co from schools due to privacy concerns

#176

Post by jabroni_salad »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #154
piokoch wrote: post #121

If anyone needs a good example of the: 1. click bait title 2. primitive advertisement, all in one place, this article is a great example. Was Gmail banned in Denmark schools? Obviously not, there is some regulation in one of the counties and it was about chromebook usage because of some privacy concerns. One. County. Article is written by a company which is a direct competitor of Gmail (they are email service too) an…

"nobody wants mediocre user interface" Is Gmail your idea of a good user interface? How many ordinaty people can setup filters to direct email from a prticular sender to a particular folder? Why can't I right click on an email and add it to a specific rule? "be unable to search emails" The mobile Gmail app fails at search, if my latest email has a word in it, typing in that word into searchbar returns nothing. I had…

> so I think we've failed as an industry here

Yeah, actually. Mail storage/search is not a solved problem. I recently trained an executive assistant to use ediscovery tools because the person she supports has too many mails to be indexed.

Do yourself a favor and delete as much as possible before it all runs away from you. Stop using email as a system of record now or you will really wish you did later on. Sounds like you might have crossed that point recently.

Do you keep your paper bank statements directly in your mailbox or do you move them to a filing cabinet? Likewise, you should download your records from the bank's site and store them in a real filesystem, not some subfolder of your inbox.

Re: Denmark bans Gmail and Co from schools due to privacy concerns

#177

Post by EUROCARE »

0xedd wrote: post #173
EUROCARE wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's cool, but you can't give out mailboxes for free like you can give away computers. It needs to run somewhere, the servers maintained by someone. Do you have a better solution than Gmail? I know only about Microsoft, is that even an improvement?

You can Google free email services rather than use bing. Protonmail is one. Free version includes much more than what a student needs. Students can sign up themselves.

The point here is data privacy. Freemail means you explicitly hand over your (meta)data as a payment. Students are not going to go for Protonmail, they're going to use their already existing Gmail.

You can't rely on students having their own inboxes anyways. They will claim they forgot the password, it doesn't work, they are not getting teacher's messages, etc etc. You need a place where you can deliver critical information and be sure it arrived, and have a way of proving it was/wasn't read, a way of restoring lost access (without losing the messages), a way of proving that access is possible and happened, a way of recovering deleted messages...

Re: Denmark bans Gmail and Co from schools due to privacy concerns

#178

Post by throwaway4good »

2000UltraDeluxe wrote: post #162
msh wrote: post #58

Its not true. I only have a correct source in danish: https://www.berlingske.dk/samfund/et-centralt-vaerktoej-for-... But only one local county have been forbidden from processing personal data on school chromebooks as they did not do any analysis of the consequences.

Elsinore's mayor seems to be of a different opinion: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/benediktekiaerhelsingor_educa... (in Danish) Long story short, she claims this will have far-reaching consequences not just for Elsinore, but for other school districs as well. Elsinore did, indeed, do an analysis, which is clearly stated in the report: https://www.datatilsynet.dk/afgoerelser/afgoerelser/2022/jul... (also in Danish --…

I think the mayor is correct.

GDPR is EU law. And unless some super lawyer shows up from Helsingørs kommune or more likely from Google then this goes not only for Denmark but the rest of the EU as well.

Normally a seller of a piece of software to an institution would provide the documentation, if nedeed, that the piece of software follows GDPR.

Now with Google, Helsingør likely gets the software for free. And Google takes the data and use it for targeting advertisement and maybe other things.

Personally I think the school system in Denmark should only use suppliers with a straight-forward pay and use business model.

Much in the same way I don't think our children's text books should contain advertisement or be sponsored by business or political interests.

Re: Denmark bans Gmail and Co from schools due to privacy concerns

#179

Post by O__________O »

hardwaresofton wrote: post #66
O__________O wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oddly, Linux is hard, if not impossible, to run on many Chromebooks as root. A lot of Chromebooks only support “linux beta” (aka Crostini) as a subsystem of ChromeOS and the hardware doesn’t support running Linux as root from boot; frequently the low end models.

> Oddly, Linux is hard, if not impossible, to run on many Chromebooks as root. A lot of Chromebooks only support “linux beta” (aka Crostini) as a subsystem of ChromeOS and the hardware doesn’t support running Linux as root from boot; frequently the low end models. Does any one know the reason for this -- was there ever a good description given by someone technical on the project as to why it worked out that way? All…

All I know is the motherboard was the filter given on this site:

https://mrchromebox.tech/#devices

No reasoning is provided. If you’re curious, I sure you could contact the author for clarification.

Re: Denmark bans Gmail and Co from schools due to privacy concerns

#180

Post by flatline »

koheripbal wrote: post #156
spookie wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it isn't, it should be. School is obligatory, we really shouldn't employ commercial products in schools to begin with. In Portugal, some years ago, kids were given computers with a Linux distro pre-installed for *free*, and LibreOffice was used as a word processor replacement. Argentina did the same thing, hell there were others too.

You think the government builds desks, blackboards, buildings, directly. Everything is outsourced to private companies. That's how economics works.

Private companies can develop software with government data rights. Hosting isn’t free but they pay for an n-year contract with support and can find another vendor for the software and hosting in n years if they want. That’s a good collaboration between govt and industry, governments should insist on stuff like this so they retain ownership over what they paid for, as much as possible.
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