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.

Comments

Sounds like shilling

[bky1701]

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.

Re:My old Uni did this.

[ajuda]

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?

"School Official" is not strange, but CRITICAL...

[nweaver]

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.