Comment by waxman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by waxman | Hacker News Reader

My grandma is more tech-savvy than my university.

We were scheduled to adopt Google apps this February, but at the last minute a group of professors stymied the proposal for a number of bogus "privacy" concerns, which included, and I wish I was kidding about this one, a fear that our data could be hosted on a Google server in a country with questionable human rights laws. What?!

Meanwhile, we use the ancient open-source Horde e-mail system, which is slow, frequently down, and far less secure than Google's. It's expensive to maintain, and its webmail interface looks like it was designed by a kindergartener in the mid-90's. Plus, our pricey yet outdated university servers are just sitting in some random IT room on campus, and are probably far more susceptible to data theft than anything in the cloud (both virtually, and in the form of someone just picking up the servers and walking out with them).

The future is in the cloud. Institutions wise enough to adopt it will enjoy huge benefits; those who are too afraid will be left behind.

And don't even get me started on the generally sorry state of technology use in education...

> I wish I was kidding about this one, a fear that our data could be hosted on a Google server in a country with questionable human rights laws

Was that in UK by any chance? If so, take a look at Data Protection Act - especially this:

Personal data shall not be transferred to a country or territory outside the European Economic Area unless that country or territory ensures an adequate level of protection for the rights and freedoms of data subjects in relation to the processing of personal data.

If you want to be ok with the law, basically you cannot store your emails (which at some point will definitely contain personal data) in an unknown location. Gmail storage qualifies as an unknown location for all we know.

Google has a UK office, so they have to comply with the law, too.

To be honest, I'm not sure how does it work for companies providing the technology, but from what I can tell Google doesn't store the personal data itself. They let you store theoretically opaque strings. They might guarantee that their own emails which contain personal data are not stored in the country X. But since they don't really provide a system for storing personal data, your emails might end up in that country. It was your responsibility not to put them in a potentially foreign place and it was you who broke the rule, not Google.

So in the end, their UK office might be compliant - but it's not the same as their datacenters.

It's in the US, but that's a fascinating law.

Google actually specifies that they cannot disclose the exact location of one's Google Apps data because it is automatically distributed across three different server farms out of several dozen (or more) potential locations. They also are purposefully vague about disclosing the locations of their data farms, in general. Incidentally, one likely reason for this is security.

I agree that there are some genuine privacy and security concerns about the cloud, but I think most criticisms fall into the unforgivable category of "I don't trust it because I can't see it."

And in this sense, academics refusing to accept the cloud are like academics refusing to accept gravity.

I think it's not a problem of not seeing the data. After all, outsourcing storage and processing is very common now. The real problem is that when you need to see the data, you cannot and you don't know where to find it.

For example, you cannot easily swap the email server for a new one and recover everything from backups. Actually, you cannot even reliably make full on-site google apps backups afaik, which is a hard requirement in many places. If you have problems with disappearing data, not only do you have to wait for Google to fix it, but you have a specific priority in their queue. In extreme cases you might want to get a bunch of consultants to deal with the problem on-site right now. No such option if you outsource your storage.

The cloud is the future, and it's a general improvement over previous mail servers, but that doesn't mean that it's 100% perfect yet, or that those criticisms are invalid (well, some of them are). Individuals and institutions are well within the bounds of sanity to say that Google's cloud solution doesn't give exactly what they need, and that in turn pushes Google to improve those cloud solutions (or a competitor to address those issues and snipe the sale).

I take it you're a Yalie? I can't believe they're still using Horde, which still (last time I checked, back in 2006) uses iFrames.

They are right to be duly diligent, but even if they don't choose Google, it is unlikely that they should truly self-host email.

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