What a clickbaity headline. It's just about one state, and only for schools. (The first sentence of that article is: "The central German state of Hesse’s local Data Protection Authority (DPA) has banned the use of Microsoft 365 in its schools")
It is a bit clickbaity. But on the whole i'd say its warranted. Because these judgements are precedents which bind other DPA's. The scope of the factual findings is broad enough to say that it affects any business using 365 handling personal data. That leaves only the question of legality in the specific case. Which depends on the presence and kind of personal data present in 365.
> precedents which bind other DPA's.
They aren't legally binding. Neither are they in practice. The German DPAs alone are famous for bickering between one another.
> Meanwhile, Polish gov't uses Microsoft Teams [1] as one of ways of verifying citizens who are applying for trusted profile service. Preface: Teams is horrible and it's super bloated for a simple chat app, but it's a mainstay for remote work along Slack and Zoom unfortunately. It's still better than the architecture using ID.me they built for unemployment benefits during COVID which in FL was subsequently hacked and…
Why the teams hate. I personally find it the best conferencing tool for recurring cadence
Onboarding alone is enough for plenty of hate. What feels like half a dozen competing SSO systems trying to highjack the funnel, each of them gimped by two other internal Microsoft factions trying to shove in their upselling path. And of course with a Byzantine form flow through the full set of desktop client, OS-level Windows user identity management and multiple browsers (system default, Edge, and iirc occasionally even that pre-webkit edge, perhaps popping up because of some activeX zombie). I recently had the pleasure of participating in a one-off teams call (project handover to an external consultant), from a company network that runs on Microsoft but without 365 and no routine Teams usage outside of some unrelated division, with a non-Microsoft browser as the system default. A day to remember. Spent hours between the onboarding labyrinth and a pre-existing private account that was almost but not quite accepted by the Microsoft maze, before I eventually got in dusting off some ancient Skype account. Yeah, that Skype, the one I stopped using around the time I quit ICQ.
Meanwhile in Hungary someone breached the system used by every school for kids between age 6 and 18 and walked away with everything. We are not just talking of grades but all the personal data, disabilities. Teachers HR data too. Oh and also the source code https://thedailywtf.com/articles/hungry-for-an-education
For office webapps "local servers to store customer information" is not the solution IMHO. Spreadsheets and documents in general can store arbitrary data, including personal information. If MS's customers are told that documents are stored in the USA they can't store personal information in there and I don't understand why this should apply only to schools and not to companies in general.
A solution could be creating a German company using German servers, licensing Office 365 from MS and also paying it to maintain those servers. That should put the data out of the reach of the CLOUD act.
Misleading title. It's not all of Germany it's one state AND it's not a general ban just a ban from schools.
> "The central German state of Hesse’s local Data Protection Authority (DPA) has banned the use of Microsoft 365 in its schools, citing concerns over privacy violations"
Good call, I'm using a software firewall on Windows and the number of unnecessary requests it makes for gaming services, widgets I haven't used once and telemetry is surreal
yes this is very relevant to o365. /s
Actually... the title say Microsoft 365. Assuming the title is correct M356 can include Windows 10 (and shudder 11) licenses.
At the beginning of the pandemic Microsoft Teams was practically forced on everyone with children in Bavaria. With practically forced I mean you could either sign a document to get Teams for free or your child could not participate in online classes. A whole age group of children whose first online experience is Microsoft.
In my opinion we should start there: Instead of unrealistic bans that no one will ever enforce we should not pressure people to use privacy invading software. Instead we should teach our children the use of free and open source tools to accomplish their goals.
MSFT should be leading the way. In what universe do they need to be collecting data from kids, especially that which cannot be kept locally. Telemetry data (which I suggest is reasonable that they collect) can be stored in local 'log' style DBs. It's not data they need to repatriate. Although for login and identity management, it might be reasonable to have that quasi centralized for security reasons. While MS could…
MSFT should be leading the way. In what universe do they need to be collecting data from kids, especially that which cannot be kept locally. Telemetry data (which I suggest is reasonable that they collect) can be stored in local 'log' style DBs. It's not data they need to repatriate. Although for login and identity management, it might be reasonable to have that quasi centralized for security reasons. While MS could…
MS, G, AWS will end up offering local datacenters operated by local companies owned by them. They'll cost a little more.