Microsoft backs law banning Google Apps from schools Microsoft is backing a bill in Massachusetts that would effectively force schools to stop using Google Apps, or any other service that uses students' data. "Any person who provides a cloud computing service to an educational institution operating within the State shall process data of a student enrolled in kindergarten through …
@daniel b ( and others) the bill says nothing about Google or MSoft. It simply and reasonably says ' don't use our kids data for commercial gain'. What's wrong with that ? Google or anyone else is free to play in is space as long as they abide by that rule. Gets my vote.
The use of a such a service (a cloud computing service that used the students data for commercial purposes) in the UK would already be a breach of the data protection act.
If by "MS competition" you mean "companies who can't be trusted to provide basic protection for students details" then yes, this is obviously amed to whack out "MS competition".
and Eadon would be right. It is obvious, even for the article's author, that bill is obviously aimed to whack out MS competition
The bill affects anyone (including Microsoft) that would collect data on school children in the course of their education. The author of this article should be ashamed of themselves for their poor journalism. All Google have to do to comply with this law is to not collect data on the school children. It's not a law to ban Google from classrooms. But it is aimed at Google. There's no contradiction between the two. Google are attempting to exchange schoolchildren's data for free tools. I agree that this is wrong. All that would happen is Google would have to either start charging for their services to education like other companies, or else grant it truly free.
@H4rm0ny:
Damn right - Any company who wants to profit from personal and behavioral data of schoolchildren, while they are at school, in order to advertise at them, should really think about ethics.
School of all places should be free from constant bombardment from advertising, particularly considering the people who are being advertised at are minors.
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All it means that Google will have to sell them at their real price (not at the advert subsidized one).
No they won't. All they'll have to do is make a sandboxed version that doesn't get snooped on (licensed for educational use only). They can give that away, and subsidize it with the money they make from the non-students.
As Steve Knox says, all Google will do is make a version of their apps that comply with the law, and then give them away anyway. Merely using the apps will be enough to keep children wanting to use them because that is what they are used to - and it is exactly what Microsoft have been doing for years. That is why Microsoft are upset - there really is competition to their de facto monopoly of educational software at last.
I rarely criticize microsoft.
I do it for the first time.
The big white man the brother - Bill Gates!
The red-skinned Sharp-sighted Falcon the Web designer welcomes you!
Windows 8 did not sustain the test for reliability. It is known to you.
But, it is possible that you do not know that the new operating system is absolutely not suitable for use in modern Russia.
You created a good classical product. The best programmers worked wonderfully well.
However the new generation of vandals does not read classics. Them does not interest romanticism of programming.
Nevertheless, they use modern electronics.
Therefore, quickly and successfully, they crack computers of users.
Antiviruses are powerless.
Firewalls do not protect.
System administrators are helpless.
Instead of trampling down another's mobile phones, you should think of clients.
I congratulate employees women of your empire on March 8.
If you do not read my congratulation on March 7, on March 8 I will publish this text and I will congratulate.
One does not sharpen the axes after the time they are needed. Russian proverb.
However to me it is unclear, how I learn that you will read.
Translated by Google.
Well two other AI's upvoted it and downvoted you, I suggest that just because your meat logic is incapable of rendering meaning does not indicate the absence of meaning.
Perhaps I'm being too harsh, Google translate does miss the nuences of the original binary.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/03/03/us-education-database-idUSBRE92204W20130303
"The database is a joint project of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which provided most of the funding, the Carnegie Corporation of New York and school officials from several states. Amplify Education, a division of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, built the infrastructure over the past 18 months. When it was ready, the Gates Foundation turned the database over to a newly created nonprofit, inBloom Inc, which will run it."
"including but not limited to advertising purposes that benefit the cloud computing service provider,"
And THAT boys and girls, is the real reason.
The advertsing space within schools are the propery of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and no-one else is going to play there except us. So there.
"Section 1. Notwithstanding any general or special law to the contrary any person who provides a cloud computing service to an educational institution operating within the State shall process data of a student enrolled in kindergarten through twelfth grade for the sole purpose of providing the cloud computing service to the educational institution and shall not process such data for any commercial purpose, including but not limited to advertising purposes that benefit the cloud computing service provider."
No mention of personally identifiable data so it has to mean all data. Every mouse click and every site visit generates data of some sort.
A cloud service is any service not on your own network
What about all those cloud services that may unwittingly take students' data for commercial purposes. Presumably Massachusetts school authorities will either have to ask them all to blacklist their IP blocks or firewall half the internet. Hit counts are used to justify advertising revenue so if a student registers a hit their data is used for commercial purposes.
Any page with a Facebook 'Like' button
Amazon ('People who bought that book also bought these books')
Most search engines
Any map application
Any news site
Yellow pages / directory sites
They'll need to remove all those toolbars, especially the Bing Bar from everyone's computers. And ban Internet Explorer 10 as its 'Do Not Track' preference will be ignored by most of the internet.
Massachusetts students will leave school thinking DuckDuckGo and Wikipedia are THE places to do their research.
Of course if the wording is changed to include the word 'Personal' it might give Google too much wiggle room to use anonymized data...
It should be mandatory that schools learn a variety of computing platforms and software not just the Microsoft one that way we won't be bringing up a bunch of kits who only know how to use one set of software and don't have the skills to pick up using new software when they enter the work place.
When i was at school we had both Acorn RISC OS machines and Windows PCs and we were expected to be able to use them both, and on top of that i had a Amiga as a home machine, And i think its because of the use of multiple platforms and software i find it easy to pickup new software quickly today
I would probably swap OS360 for OS390 a.k.a. z/OS as most financial institutions using mainframes are running that these days. But yeah, I remember graduating as someone who knew more than average because I actually dabbled around with Linux, AIX and HP/UX.... only to find myself confronted by a 3270 terminal 10 months after graduating.
You always know you are dealing with a shitty underhanded corporation that will use just about every dirty trick in the book.
This does have echoes of the famous Scopes Monkey Trial ( made in to play/movie called inherit the wind) where backward bible bashers tried to make it a criminal offence to teach evolution in schools and prosecuted a teacher for doing so.
"He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind"
Careful Microsoft this could backfire and be known as The Microsoft Monkey Boy Trial
Headline is click-bait, but Google are unlikely to be compliant. If you read that link more carefully, they state that they do not serve adverts in Google Apps for Education, but they don't say anything about not collecting data nor about not merging that data with other services outside of Google Apps for Education. You can always monetize the data later. Having children's data from their earliest days onwards - that's commercially valuable and in Google's best financial interests.
https://www.computerworld.com/s/article/107365/CIO_who_backed_Open_Document_in_Mass._resigns?taxonomyId=070
Ah, I stand corrected, it isn't the Commonwealth of Massachusetts who's running the show, it's Microsoft, and they have Massachusetts in their back pocket.
But Microsoft do not go far enough. Azure should also be banned. And Office365. And Outlook.com. And anything else that goes against the ethos of cooperation and the sharing of knowledge.
After all, we should educate children about IT, not turn them into gormless button mashers.
I look forward to MS ceasing all work with schools. For the sake of the children. :-)
Try searching "us student data collection gates Common Core"
You'll discover that Microsoft, though the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is attempting to slurp MASSIVE amounts of PERSONAL data about ALL US STUDENTS and $ELL it!
This is merely another attempt at BIG BUSINESS monopolization.
Expect an explosion from parents of ALL political persuasions and FOLLOW THE MONEY!
"In operation just three months, the database already holds files on millions of children identified by name, address and sometimes social security number. Learning disabilities are documented, test scores recorded, attendance noted. In some cases, the database tracks student hobbies, career goals, attitudes toward school – even homework completion".... link
> It was an unnamed Jesuit* who coined the phrase "Give me the child for seven years and I will give you the man" (which is a tad unfortunate given the revealed predilections of some modern men of the cloth)
There has been research done that has shown that the rate of paedophilia is virtually the same in all occupations, ie the rate amongst Catholic priests is no higher than amongst Register journalists. Perhaps Mr Thomson might care to get his own house in order before he starts criticising others.
> There has been research done that has shown that the rate of paedophilia is virtually the same in all occupations, ie the rate amongst Catholic priests is no higher than amongst Register journalists. Perhaps Mr Thomson might care to get his own house in order before he starts criticising others.
1. After some Googling the rate of paedophilia amongst Catholic priests is given by Catholic sources as 0.3%* (1 in 300) in a total population of 400,000**. Therefore there are 1,200 paedophile priests. The Register certainly has less than 300 journalists so at the given rate it has less than 1 paedophile on the books.
2. Even if the entire journalist staff of The Register comprised solely of predatory paedophiles it wouldn't somehow excuse the unlrelated child abuse perpetrated by Catholic priests nor the church's cover-up of such abuses.
* http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/facts/fm0011.html
(Note that this figure is for priests falling under the strict definition of "paedophile"; i.e. those solely attracted to pre-pubescent children. By this definition Jimmy Saville wasn't a paedo...)
** http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_Catholic_priests_are_there_in_the_world
It's a bad precedent for any government agencies to trade data about you and/or your behavior (software use) for access to 'free' cloud applications.
Secondly, cloud apps put government services behind an all to easy killswitch of simply blocking/disrupting network connectivity to put the enterprise completely out of action.
I'm torn. On the one hand, I think this type of bill is actually a good idea. If the school provides essentially a "mandated" E-Mail account, this account really should have to be ad-free, and at that point there's no reason to be trolling through the E-Mail to target ads if there's no ads. (I also opposed the "channel one" they had luckily after my time in school, where they'd waste about 15 minutes of the students day showing basically 10 minutes of ads and about 5 minutes of pseudo-educational content. Our local school district never went for this.)
On the other hand, this is quite obviously Microsoft trying to scuttle plans of their webmail competitors (who, to hype it will call it "cloud services" or something now.) Standard dirty pool on their part.
Ultimately, I think this will fail though. If Google doesn't already have the capability to mark accounts "no ads" (so it won't display ads *or* collect ad data), I just can't imagine it's that difficult to add. I'm sure neither Microsoft or Google intends to provide the E-Mail for free, so Google just has to figure out how much they need to change their quote (if any) for no ads service.
As far as I can see it doesn't say anything about not being ad-funded, only that you cannot siphon off the user's details and flog them to the ad-pushers (or anyone else).
Or in other words, a bloody sensible thing which should be implemented in every educational establishment.
It would probably have been better if MS had kept their noses out though, that seems to have muddied the waters courtesy of the usual MS-hating arsehattery.
Are Google just aggregating to build a model or are they actually using the data to sell targeted advertising aimed at impressionable individuals? I couldn't care less about the former. The later OTOH would be a problem.
Very much agreed with the article though - Microsoft's online offering is mostly good enough to compete with Google.
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