[FC-discuss] Yale switching to Google Apps / Gmail

[Fred Benenson]

I think the point that Google is exempt from standard privacy practice
regulation (FERPA, etc.) is a very good one.

That said, trusting university IT systems from the pure-regulation-policy
standpoint is probably not the whole picture: NYU is notorious for
accidentally leaking student data like SSNs, etc. The ultimate question is
"Who can you trust?" and while universities (especially ones like Berkeley
and Michigan with established CS departments or renowned reputations) are
likely to have student friendly privacy policies, I'm not sure its safe to
expect most others to both have good privacy policies and the IT
infrastructure to back them up.

The silver lining is that students organizing for change in these areas (I
can just hear the rallying cries: "Give us HTTPS or Give us Death!", "Just
say no to logs") are far more likely to be effective than students
organizing against Gmail, or any other corporate overlord.

F


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On Wed, Feb 10, 2010 at 9:57 AM, Greg Grossmeier <greg at grossmeier.net>wrote:

> <quoting name="Alec Story" date="2010-02-10" time="00:50:31 -0500">
> > Cornell switched this past year, from a user perspective, it's been great
> > having tons of storage and a useful web interface, as well as still
> having
> > IMAP and POP
>
> "useful" web interface is up for debate regarding gmail: where the EF are
> my threads? Do you know where in the thread I am replying right now, and
> to whom? Only because I quote correctly. </rant>
>
> But seriously, I don't know of any modern university IT department who
> also doesn't have "tons of storage" along with IMAP and POP access.
>
>
> > but I haven't been able to find anything on the freedom
> > aspects of things besides general privacy agreement stuff that probably
> > doesn't hold water.
>
> How about the fact that Google is not an educational institution so FERPA
> might be iffy when it comes to students privacy. From the ed.gov page on
> FERPA: "The law applies to all schools that receive funds under an
> applicable program of the U.S. Department of Education." --
> http://www2.ed.gov/policy/gen/guid/fpco/ferpa/index.html
>
> Yep, Google is exempt.
>
> Same issue with Google Health. From their own mouth:
> "Unlike a doctor or health plan, Google Health is not regulated by the
> Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), a federal
> law that establishes data confidentiality standards for patient health
> information." -- http://www.google.com/intl/en-US/health/hipaa.html
>
> Basically, you are losing A LOT of privacy rights (from a university
> student perspective) by using Google for email. For average joe web user,
> every webmail service has pretty much the same (bad) privacy concerns
> (exempt from this statement are the free speech centric hosting/email
> providers that delete logs daily).
>
> Greg
>
> --
> |       Greg Grossmeier |
> | http://grossmeier.net |
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