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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

#131

Post by mavhc »

sbuk wrote: post #68
rgrieselhuber wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of open source options that will teach them 90% of what most people will need to know. Taxpayer money should not be going to these corporations.

Google Workspace is free to schools. Therefore it 'costs' significantly less than running the infrastructure to service accounts for several 100's to 1000's of staff and kids using a FOSS solution. Of course, there are other email providers, but they are rarely free. They'll also still need to put security solutions in front of it, or indeed Exchange Online, because the offerings are rudimentary to say the least, but…

It's pragmatic to not continue the monopolies that cost the taxpayer money on an ongoing basis.

The point is to not pay Microsoft money to promote Microsoft's continued monopoly, which will mean you have to pay them money again next year.

Any school paying for closed source software when they could be funding a company to make open source software is doing it wrong. Same with textbooks.

100s of 1000s of schools all paying for something they won't own and will have to pay for again in the future.

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

#132

Post by mavhc »

keewee7 wrote: post #100
sofixa wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But there are, there's even a site categorising them: https://european-alternatives.eu/category/email-providers

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

And Chromebooks, by definition.

Will be fun if you're a school that just bought 1000 Chromebooks.

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

#133

Post by rgrieselhuber »

sbuk wrote: post #68
rgrieselhuber wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of open source options that will teach them 90% of what most people will need to know. Taxpayer money should not be going to these corporations.

Google Workspace is free to schools. Therefore it 'costs' significantly less than running the infrastructure to service accounts for several 100's to 1000's of staff and kids using a FOSS solution. Of course, there are other email providers, but they are rarely free. They'll also still need to put security solutions in front of it, or indeed Exchange Online, because the offerings are rudimentary to say the least, but…

You bring up a good point, which is other costs beyond financial. Mindshare, attention, and privacy costs also need to be considered and a case can be made that the people should not be funding these costs for corporations. Especially with very little oversight or insight into what they are paying for.

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

#134

Post by oellegaard »

moooo99 wrote: post #108
sidibe wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Privacy implies security as well

But just because an application is secure does not necessitate that it is respecting privacy laws

Exactly, which is the case for Google in general. Probably one of the most "secure" places to put your data, but from a privacy point of view self-hosting would be better, but then the security will be lower.

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

#135

Post by angio »

sidibe wrote: post #109
angio wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The CLOUD ACT was passed explicitly because Microsoft argued that data hosted on European servers was out of reach of the US government.

Ah well in that case it seems that no American company with private data should be allowed to do business in Europe if we look at the recent laws in Europe and this American one?

It's more complicated than that, for now it looks like courts will decide on a service by service basis.

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

#136

Post by goto11 »

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.

That misconfiguration is what triggered the investigation, but the investigation uncovered more severe problems, for example the municipality could not guarantee that private information was not transferred to unsafe countries.

Google have some setup where the data is stored in the EU (Ireland) and allegedly the encryption key is only available to the Ireland branch of Google and not the US branch. But the setup is still accessed by personnel from the US branch.

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

#137

Post by yunohn »

uptown wrote: post #83

Along these lines -- would love to know what the marketplace for all of the data collected on students from the myriad of online-learning platforms schools rushed to implement over the past couple years while homeschooling replaced in-person education. Target the smartest kids, who may go to the best schools, and earn the highest salaries and buy the most stuff. You've got to figure there's a huge market of buyers fo…

Well, if they are legit and compliant with US law, there’s COPPA (1) to protect against this. Eg, TikTok was recently (2) fined for violations.

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children%27s_Online_Privacy_Pr...

(2) https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/27/18243312/tiktok-ftc-fine-...

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

#138

Post by II2II »

dx034 wrote: post #12
wiz21c wrote: post #2

Now let's ban MSFT Office365 too. It's of zero use to teach whatever to the kids.

I'd have to disagree here. Teaching kids how to use Word and Excel will help them for the majority of office jobs out there.

There is a difference between teaching students how to use a product and teaching students through the use of a product. The latter intentionally teaches them transferrable skills. The former does not, and runs the risk that any change in the product (nevermind using a different product) will leave the student without the necessary skills to adapt.

The approaches to teaching can vary quite wildly. My mother was doing some resume padding when I was in middle school, so I got to compare what they were teaching with what my school was teaching. They were teaching rote skills with a separate book directed towards each product, which is to say Word had a book full of screenshots illustrating procedures and WordPerfect had its own book full of screenshots illustrating procedures. They were not laying down the foundations for transferrable skills, nor did they expect students to pick it up. In contrast, my middle school was using obsolete computers and had no expectation the software would be used in business. The emphasis was directed towards laying out and formatting documents instead, which had a much longer lasting impact.

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

#139

Post by Loughla »

hkpack wrote: post #106
bluGill wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should need to teach how to think. Part of that means the ability to adopt to whatever tool. Thus schools should require students to use each of 4 different office system. O365 is only one of them, and LibreOffice is an obvious section choice (I'm have no idea what the others might be). tools come and go, but the concepts you are using the tools for stick around. I wasted a lot of time learning WordPerfect F-keys bac…

> Should need to teach how to think. Do you know if there is any sort of consensus on this topic on how to do it? It looks like a very popular belief, but do anyone actually knows how to think, and even more, how to teach how to think without making it just a different kind of propaganda?

So not really. There are broad strokes ways to teach critical thinking skills, but (believe it or not) critical thinking is a very higher order skill that is difficult to transfer across domain areas.

It follows a few steps: teach the scientific process, analyze analogies to whatever it is you're approaching, identify appropriate and relevant sources for information and how to assess their reliability/trustworthiness, identify biases including self-biases, and fostering open-mindedness and an ability to evaluate points from multiple perspectives.

When you are critically thinking about things, these are the steps you take - quickly, and not in any order that you can identify. But you are doing that.

That being said, because these are higher order, abstract skills for the most part, they are very hard to apply across disciplines. You need a level of base knowledge of the area to be able to sort through these steps appropriately. For example, it is easy for me to analyze statements and assess articles related to farming, education, and depression, because I have massive experience with these things. Whereas, I absolutely could not even get through evaluating appropriate sources when it comes to programming languages; I have no experience with them.

In other words, it is possible, but it takes a concerted effort in nearly every aspect of the child's life. This is not something we can do JUST in the classroom, especially when parents, often, do not want true critical reasoning in their children; my experience is that if a child can do this effectively s/he is very difficult to keep 'under control'.

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

#140

Post by hulitu »

yunohn wrote: post #127
tluyben2 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you had learned OpenOffice calc or write, would that have made much of a difference? Takes a few hours to move 80% from one to the other. Maybe if very specific functions it may take a few minutes more.

Would you prefer we mandate Vim or EMacs for kids? Both are free, so it’s a deliberate choice to be made. And how do you suggest we support this decision and their potential inability to use an IDE in the real world?

I think ed is more user friendly.
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