Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Denmark bans Gmail and Co from schools due to privacy concerns

tutanota.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 214 posts

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

#181

Post by jodrellblank »

Aerroon wrote: post #49
bigDinosaur wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing really compares to Excel. (Nothing really compares to Excel in some of its most terrible bugs either).

What does Excel do that something like LibreOffice Calc does not? I'm genuinely curious because I've not run into any issues with the latter that the former would've solved so far.

Excel has FlashExtract and FlashFill[1]

Excel has COM automation going back to the old days; from many programming languages on Windows you can instantiate "Excel.Application" and then script it as if you were using the GUI - and have the GUI visible and showing you what is happening. Add workbooks, worksheets, select ranges, copy/paste, enter formulae and get their results, apply formatting, etc. Because it plugs into Windows' COM system, you don't need to download an Office SDK or Excel-specific library for your language to use it, any language which can talk to COM can do it, including VBScript, PowerShell, Python with PyWin32, JavaScript/TypeScript, C#, etc.

If you save an Excel document on a SharePoint (Office365) site, then multiple people can open it. When they do that, it's a multiplayer spreadsheet - you see who else has the document open, which cell(s) they are looking at, changes betewen all people are propagated in approximately realtime.

If you save an Excel document on an (Office365) site then Office365 has visibility into it, which means if someone else opens it, @tags you in a comment on a cell, Office365 will pick that up and email it to you for your attention.

Excel documents saved on O365 can be opened in a web browser, in a JavaScript version of Excel which has fewer features but can still join in with the above.

Excel documents saved on O365 are visible in the MSGraph API, for scripting with REST endpoints[2]

People who have been working in Silicon Valley, for FAANG companies, as software developers, pushing us all to the cloud for ten to twenty years, still thinking that Excel vs LibreOffice is a matter of a desktop program showing a grid you can put some numbers in and do sum or average, and whether you can bold or align the text, are experiencing some kind of cognitive dissonance.

Your CRUD app can now be a spreadsheet someone in HR opens, enters an employee code, and a script against the MSGraph API which offboards them, and if it hasn't worked the HR person can @ you in a comment. There goes all your custom CRUD UI, database backend, network connectivity, compiling, deployment, authorization, there's your "no code" or "low code" Excel as frontend for a small business.

Want to script a report for HR to look at? Thinking of downloading a JDK and PDF library for Java and asking for SMTP relay settings? Script MSGraph to make an Excel spreadsheet directly in a folder HR can see. A poor solution for a big business, a quick and relatively easy solution for a small business with an admin and a PowerShell script.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32116088#32129830

[2] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/resources/excel?v...

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

#182

Post by throwaway290 »

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.

Except the pesky difference that in other cases the school/gov purchases a product for students while in this case it pays nothing and supplies students as the product.

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

#183

Post by LatteLazy »

sofixa wrote: post #142
keewee7 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But they didn't just ban GMail. The banned the entire Google Docs/Workspace portfolio.

There alternatives to the Google Docs part too, like Collabora. It will probably require some work and won't be as polished, but there are totally ways have all of that within the EU.

That's great, except now you need an army of IT people to stitch all these services together into one actual program and make them work. Before you just called google. And you need hardware. And fun as all this hard work might sound for tech people like us, your average teacher or principle doesn't actually know how any of this will work and has basically no budget. Meanwhile the same kids are setting up their own gmail accounts, google groups, facebook messenger etc so any hope of actual privacy is gone...

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

#184

Post by zelphirkalt »

EUROCARE wrote: post #177
0xedd wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 info…

They can _choose_ to use whatever they want, as long as the school doesn't force them to use proprietary stuff. It is responsibility of the school system to create an ethical learning environment and not to promote proprietary service providers. Gmail probably doesn't finance schools in Denmark either, so even less of a reason for schools there to do no-cost promotion of Gmail. And that is just one example.

Edit: After choosing something different than the school suggests, the pupils then themselves become responsible for making sure it is a suitable alternative to the non-proprietary ethical solution, that the school suggested.

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

#185

Post by ryanmercer »

mavhc wrote: post #125
ryanmercer wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excel is a far different beast than what Libre Calc offers, and then what Google Sheets offers. It has some formulas that are exclusive (mind you Liber likely has some that Excel no longer has), outside of startups it is effectively the industry standard as well and is used in all kinds of industries and roles. Libre also has different features than Excel which has different features than Sheets, etc, but Excel is th…

And that's why you only learn to drive an excavator if you get a job that requires it. Nothing at the level students do spreadsheets is different between spreadsheet programs

My wife is a high school teacher, the stuff those kids are doing now in class is beyond anything I did the first decade I worked in an office. I'm 37, high school education of today in no way resembles the high school experience I had - a subset of kids are even graduating high school and simultaneously completing an associates now.

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

#186

Post by EUROCARE »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #184
EUROCARE wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 info…

They can _choose_ to use whatever they want, as long as the school doesn't force them to use proprietary stuff. It is responsibility of the school system to create an ethical learning environment and not to promote proprietary service providers. Gmail probably doesn't finance schools in Denmark either, so even less of a reason for schools there to do no-cost promotion of Gmail. And that is just one example. Edit: Aft…

Email inboxes are one of the many services schools buy, it's not about any promotion and of course Google doesn't promote them, this is a service they provide for money, not some barter. This is like saying they promote a catering provider, furniture manufacturer or paper factory by buying from them... It's not like people aren't capable of using other email providers after using Gmail - email looks just the same regardless of the company (usually works worse though), and people have their own email too, their school inbox is usually not their first nor last contact with it.

Pupils' personal email inbox is their own stuff and completely out of the question. We're talking about school-managed inboxes with addresses ending with the school's domain.

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

#187

Post by woevdbz »

I think back at my days in college, when a bunch of the computer science lab professors and postdocs had basically unaudited root access by design to all of the college's email and Unix logs... Or later, when I worked at an ISP and saw nominative clickstream data being casually handed over on USB sticks... I don't miss local control.

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

#188

Post by ClumsyPilot »

jabroni_salad wrote: post #176
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

but a bank statement is a legal document. Its counts as 'proof' for legal matters.

If I take an email and save it to a file system, and delete ir from the mailbox, there is no evidence of anything.

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

#190

Post by easrng »

msh wrote: post #116
goto11 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ruling is "the first in a series of cases regarding the use of Chromebooks and the G-suite for education". So likely this is just the beginning. There have been two rulings regarding this particular municipality. First, they were investigated due to a data breach (personally-identifiable information was shared between G-suite and Youtube). This breach lead Datatilsynet (the Danish Data Protection Agency) to inves…

But that was due to misconfiguration. For example the kids could access and comment on youtube videos with their school accounts and when it did that the comments was posted with their full name and school/class name.

Oh, so that's why Youtube doesn't show comments on my school account anymore. Makes sense I guess.
Post reply on HN