Yale Switching To Gmail, Not Without Opposition

PwnSnake writes "While it makes sense for small (and large) corporations to move to Gmail, something seems amiss when a top private university decides to hand everything over to Google. Although most in that community seem to welcome the change, several organizations on campus have joined forces to call for a transparent process and get students and faculty thinking about the downsides of the switch. The problem is choice (users can already forward mail to Gmail; it doesn't make sense to force that option and not have a backup or opt-out mail server)."

Comments

Having gone there...

[langelgjm]

I was a grad student there, and most of the people I knew hated the Horde webmail interface. I practically never used it, since I've always set up IMAP.

My current university also outsources most of their student e-mail services to Google... again, I almost always access it through IMAP. The main downside I've run into is that the university version of Gmail doesn't have access to Labs features that you get with regular Gmail.

Re:News flash: you'll never make everyone happy.

[TheRaven64]

I looked at that FAQ, and it says that Google employees will never have access to your email unless access is explicitly grated by your admin. It also says, in the same answer, that Google employees may delete things which violate their ToS, which seems to directly contradict this (how can they delete things without write access, how can they know it violates the ToS without read access?). The answer about whether they complied with EU data protection laws was a very round-about way of saying 'no'.

What did I not see on that page:

• Who is performing third party security audits (no one?).
• What internal policies and security measures Google has in place to prevent their employees accessing the data.
• How these policies are enforced.
• What legal guarantee Google offers of your privacy and what compensation they offer in cases of a breach.

It always amazes me when people read a puff-piece full of buzzwords and devoid of any content, yet come away completely reassured.