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Denmark bans Gmail and Co from schools due to privacy concerns

tutanota.com

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

#201

Post by hardwaresofton »

O__________O wrote: post #179
hardwaresofton wrote: post #66

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. 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.

Thanks for this link, what ac detailed resource

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

#202

Post by ekianjo »

rattray wrote: post #198
ekianjo wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just read the TOS of gmail. Looks like you are not aware what you allow them to do with your email.

Could you share the relevant part of the TOS here? Others may appreciate the education as well.

https://edit.tosdr.org/points/13935

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

#203

Post by rattray »

ekianjo wrote: post #202
rattray wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you share the relevant part of the TOS here? Others may appreciate the education as well.

https://edit.tosdr.org/points/13935

> We also collect the content you create, upload, or receive from others when using our services. This includes things like email you write and receive, photos and videos you save, docs and spreadsheets you create, and comments you make on YouTube videos.

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

#204

Post by ymolodtsov »

spookie wrote: post #144
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.

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.

So kids now have to learn bad products like LibreOffice they will use in their life? Fantastic.

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

#205

Post by EUROCARE »

spookie wrote: post #195
EUROCARE wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 reg…

>not about any promotion You sure? Last I checked Google, Microsoft, and Texas Instruments have aggressive business deals with the educational sector to make sure no other company gets an edge there. I had to buy a nspire calculator for example, since teachers received commissions for the damn things (while in obligatory school). In university, we had our own servers for various services such as email, until Microsof…

> You sure? Last I checked Google, Microsoft, and Texas Instruments have aggressive business deals with the educational sector to make sure no other company gets an edge there.

That's because it's a lucrative market you can take with much less negotiation than individual small companies. Every company does that, only few are dealing with the government on the level of Microsoft/Google though.

> I had to buy a nspire calculator for example, since teachers received commissions for the damn things (while in obligatory school).

That sucks, but this is about schools buying Gmail for students' school managed inboxes on the school domain, not about students being forced to use Gmail. This is just like internal company email for example. Students still have their own personal inboxes at whatever service they please.

> The sheer market manipulation these companies do is obscene, there really isn't competition

If there isn't competition, then it's not market manipulation, it's just that they're the only market.

> and our kids aren't offered the high quality and respectful services they deserve

Gmail (and Outlook365) is the highest quality service currently on the market, and since the school is paying for the inbox, Google is not reading the data for ads. You can go for smaller companies with worse offers and much less software included in the subscribtion... But I don't think that's going to be a benefit to the students.

> Thing cost my parents 200 bucks, and the only thing it was used for, was rendering some fancy parabolas.

Again, that sucks, but this is not about parents paying Gmail.

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

#206

Post by Aerroon »

jodrellblank wrote: post #181
Aerroon wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 in…

Thank you for the explanations! Other than multiplayer spreadsheet editing this doesn't sound too relevant to students though or what they will be taught.

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

#207

Post by mavhc »

ryanmercer wrote: post #185
mavhc wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Fair enough, turns out my student who's just finished a GCSE (age 16) in Computer Science had never used a spreadsheet

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

#208

Post by spookie »

ymolodtsov wrote: post #204
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.

So kids now have to learn bad products like LibreOffice they will use in their life? Fantastic.

What's so bad about LibreOffice? If they want they want, they can use another word processor out of their own volition, the problem here is Word being the default.

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

#209

Post by spookie »

EUROCARE wrote: post #205
spookie wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>not about any promotion You sure? Last I checked Google, Microsoft, and Texas Instruments have aggressive business deals with the educational sector to make sure no other company gets an edge there. I had to buy a nspire calculator for example, since teachers received commissions for the damn things (while in obligatory school). In university, we had our own servers for various services such as email, until Microsof…

> You sure? Last I checked Google, Microsoft, and Texas Instruments have aggressive business deals with the educational sector to make sure no other company gets an edge there. That's because it's a lucrative market you can take with much less negotiation than individual small companies. Every company does that, only few are dealing with the government on the level of Microsoft/Google though. > I had to buy a nspire…

>If there isn't competition, then it's not market manipulation, it's just that they're the only market. The USA, Europe, and some European countries are already filling antitrust cases against Google and others like it. It's unfair competition. And if you can't see it, then I'm sure that there's nothing I can say to dissuade you.

This isn't just like an internal company email, and I am not saying this is their personal email. Like you're trying to imply.

These companies are trying to create habits and gain trust from naive kids. Making them their future clients. This creates a neverending circle, and the ones inside of it are so blinded, that'll always turn an eye to alternatives. In a space like this, its near impossible for other companies yo gain an edge, even if their product is better. It forms a rather powerful emotional allegiance to them, and their products.

Our kids should never be their clients, simply by the fact that their moral compass doesn't adhere to the simplest of market rules, and common sense. They undermine capitalism, they undermine freedom. And if you can't see this, you're blind.

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

#210

Post by EUROCARE »

spookie wrote: post #200
EUROCARE wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'm also European, from Portugal specifically. Our taxes pay for mandatory schools textbooks, just like in the US it seems.

I don't think this is the correct view of the system.

Individual schools in Portugal (as well as where I live, and in the US) are buying books on the market, and the books are competing on it - just writing a textbook doesn't guarantee any school will buy it, it's a risk - and that's great because it means the writers have to make good books and there's a lot of choice and many different styles and price levels.

That's very different from "textbooks paid for by public money" as if the state funded its creation and thus owned the copyright while de-risking it for the authors - meaning paid their salary. EU occasionally provides funding to authors and they're explicit about the writers owning their copyright, because the point is to support their independence. So suggesting moving a work into public domain just because a public school bought it is... weird. Why books and not other education equipment, e.g. chemistry/physics/electronics sets? What about educational software?

Imagine a school bought a book you wrote about programming/whatever you do (the school where I went did that a lot with many different books from small-time authors that were used as textbooks during lessons), should it suddenly become public domain just because some of the money someone spent on it came from taxes? I think that's very broken.

Public schools aren't the only ones buying textbooks anyways. There's a very healthy market of private schools, and I know of textbooks catered specifically to them, some of them even funded by them, that are then also bought by public schools. There's also homeschooling, alternative non-public non-profit schools, etc. Sometimes people buy textbooks by themselves, e.g. adults who want to (re-)learn, parents who think the books provided by school are inadequate, children who destroyed the copy they received at school...

That textbooks are "paid for by public money" is reductio ad absurdum. The system is much more complex. However, I think that the state/EU (or US) should also fund textbooks and put them into the public domain, as long as using them isn't mandatory - that's a great idea and it never hurts to have one more option.

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