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Complaint Challenges Univ. of Hawaii Email Partnership Wth Google
An anonymous reader writes "A recent move by the University of Hawaii forcing all students and faculty to migrate their independent university email accounts to Google has raised serious questions, prompting one student to file a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education, with senior faculty questioning both the implementation and scope of this partnership." One of the stranger notes: a clause, defended as standard, naming Google a "school official" of the university.
If my Community College can get away with forcing (it is actually required you use it) all students and faculty to use Hotmail, which works properly on precisely zero of my three main computers, I don't see how Gmail warrants a shitfit for any reason other than some MS bribery.
Great Intellect...
As an employer there are laws on data retention, so faculty and staff e-mail has to be retained for legal purposes.
At this point I think it's foolish for students to expect e-mail at school to remain unarchived. Both free and paid private e-mail services are available all over the place.
As an employee I use work e-mail for only work-related purposes. Nothing private. In college this would be a good lesson for students to learn- use academia e-mail for "work" related purposes, as they'll have to do in their professional lives later.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Because in most cases, Google is mining all those accounts for data and showing ads. In some cases, students may be involved with research that includes confidential data. Google does not provide guarantees that they won't mine/archive or protect that data in accordance with laws/regulations surrounding that data.
That's generally been beef I've seen with Google.
and our 2 gigabyte quotas.
You couldn't manage with 2 gigs? WTF are you doing? Let me guess, you're one of those who saves the email with the attachment rather than saving the attachment and deleting the email.
I tell people where I work, you have your email quota (set by another agency) and you get 1 pst file of 2 gigs. If you can't manage your email with that amount space, you're doing something wrong.
When they follow my suggestion, it's amazing how much space they suddenly have.
And before those of you start whining about how space is cheap, it costs about 1 penny per email per person per day to maintain. That's storage space, manpower to manage the space, backups and electricity to keep everything running. Multiply out the potentially millions of emails in an organization by that cost and you'll see why deleting emails and saving the attachment is the correct path.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
I logged in for the first time in years to say this:
If you are dealing with confidential data, you should not be emailing it in plain text. EVER.
Even if your server isn't mining the data, someone on the other end (or someone in between) could too.
Would you feel comfortable having your social security number being sent over yahoo/hotmail/random university email?
Normally, Google is the service provider. Which means if they get a warrant, or a subpoena, it goes to Google, and Google can answer it however they want or are required to. For example, with some warrants, Google would be forbidden from notifying the university about the warrant, and even when Google can, they are an intermediary that gets in the way.
By making Google a school official, such warrants and subpoenas go DIRECTLY to the University's attorneys. Berkeley's outsourced-to-google mail system has the same basic language from what I understand.
Test your net with Netalyzr
HIPPA does not require that data be passed in encrypted form. It only requires that reasonable effort be made secure it. However, that can be patient data can be transmitted via internal email because it's all Exchange and therefore encrypted over the wire, then in most cases, HIPPA is satisfied.
Email Encryption still has long way to go before it's completely transparent to user.
1. Google in in a contract with the university that sets out exactly what Google can and can not do with the data. If they break that contract they will be sued and lose. It is not in a companies interest to leave themselves open to litigation and large judgments.
2. The "school official" phrase has a few implications;
a. Subpoenas can go to the school instead of Google
b. Teachers are required to post all correspondence on Gmail for retention purposes.
c. IT is only required to support Gmail
Many universities are trying to cut IT budgets and one of the best ways is to outsource email. One of the biggest failings in the critics is that they offer no alternative. It is very easy to be an obstructionist and much more difficult to solve the issue. No matter what provider was chosen there would always be a few people who object to it and/or the process that came to the solution. For example one of the criticisms is that the comment period was too short at a couple of months and people did not have sufficient time to comment. If that period was extended to say six months there would be people criticizing that such a simple decision should not take so long and the university was wasting time and money. It is impossible to please everyone.
The "lack of consultation" issue is yet another example of what is called the "outhouse principle". It goes like this; When a huge complex project is proposed, say a power plant, where non experts do not have enough knowledge to understand the detail the approval process goes quite quickly as almost all comments are "yes" or "no". When a smaller project, such as an outhouse, is proposed everyone can understand how one is built and want to comment on every little detail of construction; what shape hole in the door(round, moon, star?), dimensions of the door, which way the door swings, how much ventilation room under the door, etc. The approval process for a simple project can be longer than a complex project.
There is no reason for everyone on campus to debate this issue until everyone is satisfied. It is a decision by the IT department who made it based on their experience and requirements. Does everyone comment when the chemistry department changes their chemical supplier? Does everyone comment when administration changes their paper supplier? Just because people think they should be able to have a say in matters they think the know about does not mean they really should.