German state of Hesse bans cloud services from schools due to privacy risks | Hacker News Reader

German state of Hesse bans cloud services from schools due to privacy risks

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I'm not German, but in the US I always thought it was a bit strange and concerning that we use taxdollars to train kids to use a proprietary, for-profit system. I understand that MS Office is (sadly) the industry standard, but how much of this is self-fulfilling, as in "it's the standard because that's what they teach, and it's what they teach because it's the standard".

You'll find similar things in school with software like Matlab; they give substantial discounts to universities for Matlab, these students because so used to it, and beg their employers to buy it, which they usually do.

Schools shouldn't be advertising vehicles for children, and I feel there should be a stronger emphasis on open technologies. Thank goodness MS can't create a proper equation editor to save their life, so LaTeX is still the standard for higher-level academia.

> Thank goodness MS can't create a proper equation editor to save their life, so LaTeX is still the standard for higher-level academia.

Higher-level academia in STEM. Other fields are likely quite much sold on Word. I can imagine that, say, law is chock-full of people using Word.

Yeah, I realized that about ten seconds after I submitted; my mom is a lawyer and due to older standards and newer ones, they use Word for about 80% of stuff, and Wordperfect for about 20% (due to it being the standard in the federal courts for a long time).

The legal world is the land of the Luddites. There are very capable people too of course, but generally I've found that the legal world to contain a higher than average percentage of Luddites.

I'm hesitant to call anyone a Luddite when I'm tacitly suggestion people use TeX, a piece of software made like 20 years before I was born :).

Hey nothing wrong with a tool that works.

We could definitely use a replacement for LaTeX sometime soon. The syntax is pretty gross and the documents are difficult to understand. And if you move from using a single document to importing multiple distinct files into a main file it's quite difficult to find where a value or setting is coming from. I've found that most LaTeX documentation is merely contained within StackExchange answers, which are of highly variable quality, which is a pretty crappy user experience.

Honestly, typically when I do “LaTeX” nowadays, I am really doing markdown for everything except equations, and using Pandoc to handle the conversion to something pretty. I think markdown is substantially better syntax than LaTeX.

You'll find that a lot of businesses use Word and Excel because they have a large, large body of institutional knowledge built up in those systems, and especially in Excel, a set of business-critical files that nothing else can open properly. They aren't picking Office because it's what the kids fresh out of college know.

I really doubt the school is wagging the dog here.

The schools job is to some extent teach what is used outside of schools. If they want to add some other things that would make sense to me, but not abandon a highly used tool.

I feel like pushing another path via schools would be wonky as well. I really would hate to have schools actively try to be the arbiter of what people should use rather than reflect the marketplace.

I believe Microsoft isn't innocent in this at all.

Every school in my city used to pirate every Microsoft product there is. I was taught how to pirate their stuff as a part of my curriculum. Now they don't, but now they're tied to Office 365 via a multi-year contract.

Nobody knew they were looking to make things legal beforehand, so nobody could offer them LibreOffice installation and support before Microsoft. There were no calls for proposals or public discussions, just news stories after the contract got signed. Us who knew better were genuinely baffled by what we could have done to avoid this situation.

MS certainly is playing the game, so is Apple, Google, etc.

Still the market is what it is and I'd rather the schools follow it for the most part rather than try to lead, partly because schools are not qualified to make these decisions.

In general, I'd agree. In my specific example, I don't. The title I've gained in high school is "computer technician".

Not everyone needs to know the alternatives, but people with my title are in the perfect position to lead the way. The alternative (as in, MS products in general) is pretty much just bashing our heads against the wall repeatedly and crossing our fingers in hope that a reinstall would fix things.

MS products work fine if our goal is to have returning customers. If it's someone closer than that (and willing to actually listen), they end up with Ubuntu (+ Skype), and the problem goes away permanently.

> I really would hate to have schools actively try to be the arbiter of what people should use rather than reflect the marketplace.

Does the fact that 'the market place' is clearly manipulating the decision makers temper your hate somewhat?

> ... because schools are not qualified to make these decisions.

By schools, do you mean various nation states' departments of education? Because policy (and curriculum) is set there, not at 'the schools'.

And government education agencies tend to be highly conservative in their thinking, partly out of political expediency, partly because of the trend towards vocational training. There's also the ridiculously long lead times in effecting any kind of policy change within education, no incentives to regularly reconsider alternatives, ease of submitting to the market's desires, etc

In any case, I disagree. Schools / education agencies need to be making these decisions, if not in whole then at least in part, as 'keep doing what we did yesterday' is horrendous policy if it's not backed up by empirical evidence.

And in this specific example, teaching students how to consume software, rather than how to discover -- or rather, removing any option to explore by insisting on non-free tools -- is failing their duty of care.

Software is one thing, but middle schools providing iPads to kids makes my blood boil. How on earth can you make kids work on one of the most closed down ecosystems there are?

At least on windows I can install everything I want or even run my preferred OS on a virtual machine...

Many schools provide computers running Windows or macOS to their students but prevent them from putting their own software on it anyways.

Kids do not learn by taking their freedom away. They learn something by exploring their environment. Yes, you need to prevent abuse, but simply locking down their system is just an easy way out for the school admin.

How would you feel about your boss taking away all your rights regarding software installation and browsing? As a dev, I'd be thoroughly pissed. Why do they question my authority?

But, there are people who'd install all crapware and browse Facebook all day without any restrictions. So what to do?

You give them all the power until they abuse it, then you take it away. Not the other way around.

Generally you don't let kids install whatever they want anyway.

Why not though? Exploring, customizing and extending your operating system should be part of the learning experience. We're on Hacker News, right?

I agree that you need to forbid certain websites and add some content filtering on the network. But there surely are kids able to circumvent those restrictions and most kids get in touch with 'dirty' content anyway. They better learn how to use the internet in a responsible way. Preventing them from hacking around and giving them a consume-only environment is worse I think.

I think more often than not it is purely the IT nightmare that is for IT to manage all those devices. Schools generally don't have the best staff or resources.

"This effectively leaves schools with few other options, unless Microsoft gets back to them with a satisfactory solution."

While businesses are obviously reluctant to use Libreoffice because they need perfect compatibility with MS Office files, K-12 students have no such constraints. What prevents the schools from standardizing on an open-source suite like Libreoffice?

What prevents them is the inability to teach students beyond "click the button that looks _precisely_ like this to get the desired effect".

That is, they consider knowledge gained in one of these applications to be non-transferable to other, similar applications.

Never mind that nobody ever made a fuss about our driver's license system where you typically learn on a single car model, with the expectation that even the biggest idiot can cope with different placements of the lighting controls or a different number of gears on their manual transmission.

Which is strange, because Microsoft hasn't kept the same icons all along, and will change things again.

I first learned AtariWriter as a kid. Then at school something on the Apple II. In high school they were all proud to be teaching us WordPerfect 5 for DOS - the same as industry was using. By college everybody had switch to Microsoft word. Microsoft then did a major change to create the ribbon UI. I expect this trend to continue.

This is really how general computing should be taught. Go deep on a few things, but make sure to expose students to a wide enough variety of different paradigms a d systems that they can glean some of the commonalities. From there, they should be able to figure out most of the rest.

It works pretty well in programming languages as well. So long as you don't go too far afield. Lisp fefeated me until I wrote a toy one and I'm still pretty stuck on Haskell, but I've had far fewer issues with some of the more traditional languages.

Sadly it’s far from this. My mom is terrible with any technology and took a computer course which taught stuff like Word. The entire instruction was basically follow fixed checklists of menus to do stuff followed by some test which is entirely about the checklist not about what you did.

She basically forgot it all within a year and is still scared to do anything complicated.

That sounds like a much better approach. Education is such a difficult thing to get right.

Of course that trend continues, but it's their typical excuse ("we need to teach marketable skills") and once the kids are part of the workforce, any further training (e.g. to learn about that mythical Ribbon UI, I remember the concern of how the economy will tank due to that retraining effort in the news back then) is Somebody Else's Problem.

Given that attitude in schools and the constant UI changes even within the MS ecosystem, I guess it should be okay to use LibreOffice for the earlier years and only use Microsoft "and that's what you might use at work" Office after year 8 ;-)

Regarding driving license, at least where I live, if you've gotten your license on a car with automatic transmission, you can't (legally) drive a car with manual transmission. I get your point though.

Correction: it may have changed since I heard about this when I got my driving license, but you've gotten your license on a car with automatic transmission, you can drive a car with manual transmission 6 months (soon to be reduced to 3 months) later with an additional training, which look like is 7 hours long.

With the students I've worked (interns) with they had all "MS Office" at school but don't know the basics so I have to explain e.g. how format a document correctly and not use e.g. 'bold' to all of them when they start.

> That is, they consider knowledge gained in one of these applications to be non-transferable to other, similar applications.

This explains the transition of MS Office to its stupid ribbon interface. We used to have standard menus on all applications. In fact, these menus and how to use them were even taught in school!

I think this generally speaks to modern computer illiteracy: Kids today know almost nothing about how a PC functions basically. Using a computer effectively today is as essential as knowing how to do basic arithmetic, if not more so. There's no reason kids can't be PC experts by grade 6 or 7 or so.

I don't believe that is how schools are supposed to approach teaching. I'm actually fairly sure they don't, outside of exceptional cases.

They certainly have no business making educational policy in contradiction to pedagogy.

If German schools function basically like Finnish ones, then they use MS products because it's what the municipality bought, and schools are a municipal service.

>That is, they consider knowledge gained in one of these applications to be non-transferable to other, similar applications.

What evidence do you have for this? Based on my experiences with k-12 tech education in the US, this sounds like complete BS.

Good for you. The article is about schools in Germany, Hessen specifically, which is where for several decades I have more to do with schools than I'd like to.

What happened to all the instructors of my day that professed MS Access was the database manager of the future?

I know many businesses that still use it extensively. Even for modern applications that call web-APIs to check for addresses or analyzing business cards to extract text info. Really no fan of basics dim-witted syntax and properties, but I am regularly surprised what some people manage to put in one giant file of basic.

Most use Access as a frontend with a normal DBMS, mostly MSSQL-Server of course.

I think a general purpose DB frontend with scripting abilities would be really needed as a replacement. You could just use a browser, but that somehow doesn't fit the target group for these kind of applications.

Retired. As soon as the kids are in the work force, they're not the teacher's problem anymore.

Let them use a plain text editor like Notepad++.

My kids are both in their late teens. When they were in elementary school, they had to use word processing apps for their written assignments, and there were specific formatting requirements.

I observed: 1) This software will be obsolete by the time they need to use it for a job. 2) Formatting is extraneous to the process of learning to write, and the myriad of distractions in the word processing software (all of those settings and buttons to explore) actually made it worse. 3) They were given formatting requirements like "margins" and "pages" for documents that would never be printed.

Adding to the irony, these archaic formatting requirements came from an organization calling itself "modern language association."

Fast forward just a few years. Today, nobody uses word processing, except for documents that will never be read, such as HR pronouncements and dissertations. People just use the e-mail editor, and graphics are pasted in via screen shots. The kids are allowed to use any app that will capture their text, and they seem to prefer Google Docs. (Don't know how that would play out with German privacy laws of course). They actually use the collaboration tools.

I suggest: Let's just get rid of word processing for students. Problem solved. The big problem is training the teachers.

If they want to talk about job skills, they should find the average wages of people who use different tools, including both word processors and text editors. I'll bet that emacs tops the list. ;-)

Instructors who wanted very specific formatting, then insisted on an editing format for submitted assignments, like .doc, instead of a presentation/print format like PDF, were tons of fun.

> The kids are allowed to use any app that will capture their text, and they seem to prefer Google Docs.

School kids around here prefer Google Docs mostly because they can chat in it.

Agreed about ditching the word processing. Most of its use in business isn't even writing original documents, from what I've seen, but filling in the blanks in a template or editing an earlier document (a proposal, say) for a slightly different situation. Composing long form prose in a word processor is, as you note, far less common than doing the same in an email field or in some basic text editor which'll be copy-pasted to an email.

Italics and such are still useful. Headers to some extent. Links, certainly. So... I say if we're gonna teach them formatting, teach them a little Markdown. Sure it may go out of style pretty soon, but so might anything. Meanwhile, it can be authored in any text editor, it mimics plain-text formatting styles that have been around for a while and seem to have some staying power, and some of the messaging apps the kids already use (Whatsapp, for instance) support a subset of it. It also introduces the idea of text as instructions to the computer, instantly making computer code less alien.

User experience?

I use proprietary office suites (both Office 365 and Apple Pages) because they’re much more intuitive and pleasant to use than the free alternatives.

Yes. Most of the time people don't get that behind these products there are very well paid and perhaps world's best designers and engineers - many of them.

So these paid products more often than not would be much more superior in terms of experience.

This might be the case, but commodity convenience and software pleasantness is probably the least important thing what should be taught and learned in school.

Apple's suite of "office"-type apps is wonderfully lightweight, yet pretty full-featured. Reminds me of using some of the lighter Open/Libreoffice alternatives on Linux, like Gnumeric, except, you know, nicer looking, easier to use, more featureful, less buggy, and with much better templates and such.

Apple's supporting apps generally are a big part of what keeps me on the platform. They're consistently more resource (including battery) friendly than any alternative with a comparable featureset, rarely or never crash[0], work seamlessly with my mobile devices, et c. Hell Preview alone would be hard to give up. What a gem of a program.

[0] Excepting Xcode, obviously :-)

Until 5 years ago, I'd have agreed with you. LibreOffice is pretty straight-forward these days though. "Straight-forward" trumps "featureful" for me.

Increased usage would likely lead to more UX improvements, but people don't want to use something not as slick as Word and Pages. Chicken and egg.

Many German schools already use Libreoffice — the Gymnasium Kronshagen, when I was there until 2014, already used OpenOffice at the time (although some computers also had MS office installed).

curt15 says> "While businesses are obviously reluctant to use Libreoffice because they need perfect compatibility with MS Office files, K-12 students have no such constraints."

I recently set up a new home-office PC for a friend. I tried to use Laplink PC Mover Ultimate to migrate/MS Office applications to the new machine: hours of phone and remote-control support failed. So I migrated the data with a USB drive and downloaded LibreOffice as an MS Office replacement.

My friend logged on to his new PC and quickly pronounced the migration a success. He's been very happy with LibreOffice ever since. Several other persons use the same machine with no problem.

The move to LibreOffice has been surprisingly transparent.

Nothing prevents them, people just don't like change.

When I was in school (read in grandpa's accent), it was teaching Text602 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2iCUfOPxTp4) and Calc602, which was locally made text processor and spreadsheet tool for DOS. Was it impossible to teach/learn? No.

People will just learn what they are thought.

There are better/worse options, but that doesn't prevent anyone from teaching anything.

Are those useful in real life for anyone? Why would you teach a skill that is meaningless the next day?

Text602? Not these days. This was taught in 1994, in the DOS days. It was useful back then.

Libreoffice, now? Yes.

Interesting, I just tweeted about Microsoft’s parental controls this morning:

> Windows 10 parental controls requires that both the parent and the kid have an email account and register with Microsoft.

https://twitter.com/philshem/status/1150667995745869824?s=21

The foundation of the MS empire is MS Office. People use office at work because it's the path of least resistance, due to fewer conversion errors (no conversion when you are using what everyone else does), and because that is what they used in school. Have the kids learn on LibreOffice, and MS Office only has one shaky leg to stand on.

It's not that hard. I required my kids to grow up with Libreoffice (and Openoffice before that). There where hassles but they where manageable. I made sure to explain why this restriction was in place. I also was willing to fight any battle with school authorities over this issue should the need arise. Fortunately that was not necessary.

I did the same. It turned out that teachers were perfectly fine using Open/LibreOffice.

I work at a university in Canada and it is the same unless they have cloud servers in Canada. I think we were on office 2010 till more recently. The patriot act allows US government access to any non americans data pretty easily, and it contradicts a lot of Canadian privacy law.

Microsoft is still an American company if the cloud servers are in Canada. Can't the US government tell Microsoft to hand over the data (which MS can fetch remotely) if it needs it for some terrorist investigation?

I believe you are correct, and that's why Azure has a dedicated German cloud with all the data residing in Germany and managed by a German data trustee, which should prevent US government from being able to tell Microsoft to do anything with that data[0]. If Canada happens to have a dedicated cloud region with similar policies, they should be in the clear.

0. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/global-infrastructure/germ...

From the article: "A year later, Microsoft closed its German cloud datacenter, and schools migrated their accounts to the European cloud. Now, the HBDI states that the European cloud may offer access to US authorities; with no way for the German government to monitor such access"

This is because the old data center was run independently of MS while they own the new ones directly. Thus, the old one was legally and technically isolated from MS and any wish they might have had to access that data.

Yes, this is the concern. Previously this was not the case with the German data center as it was not operated by Microsoft. But now that it’s closed...

IMO we should never teach proprietary software in any education system that runs on public money.

What about music classes that teach Garageband or more professional recording software like Logic or Ableton? Or art classes that teach Photoshop? Should they even be allowed to use Windows or Mac OS X? How about Google Chrome or Safari? Google search? It seems rather arbitrary to feel so strongly about word processor choice but not anything else.

>Garageband or more professional recording software like Logic or Ableton? Or art classes that teach Photoshop

Yes, schools should stop specifically teaching the UI of certain proprietary applications.

>Should they even be allowed to use Windows or Mac OS X?

Public funds should not be used to purchase those operating systems. If they were donated, they can be allowed.

>How about Google Chrome or Safari? Google search?

Those are already free, and there aren't full 5 credit courses on "How to use Chrome" like there are for MS Office and Photoshop.

It seems like you are recommending teaching something which is entirely different to what the vast majority of learners will come into contact with on a regular basis in their future lives. That is not useful and it does not prepare people for the real world.

In the United States, it is the done thing to file taxes through a proprietary software portal (as the result of extensive lobbying). [Yes, this state of affairs is a travesty] Should schools, therefore, avoid teaching people how to file taxes?

> It seems like you are recommending teaching something which is entirely different to what the vast majority of learners will come into contact with on a regular basis in their future lives. That is not useful and it does not prepare people for the real world.

Many free software replacements for proprietary software are quite similar to the locked down alternatives. Maybe if people learned a different program in school then they would continue to use it in their future lives. That would increase the number of users and the chances that other people would encounter it in the real world.

Proprietary software encourages dependence on a single company and discourages learning, the primary goal of an education institution. Realistically it is near impossible to live today without encountering proprietary software, but educational institutions should be more responsible about how they frame students' relationships with it.

> In the United States, it is the done thing to file taxes through a proprietary software portal (as the result of extensive lobbying). [Yes, this state of affairs is a travesty] Should schools, therefore, avoid teaching people how to file taxes?

Areas where centralization and high levels of security are important such as tax filing, flight booking, and online banking will likely use proprietary software for the foreseeable future. Rather than taking the strict stance that these activities must not occur on school grounds they should teach students how to protect themselves from potential harms of proprietary software (e.g. by running programs in isolated environments).

> Areas where centralization and high levels of security are important such as tax filing, flight booking, and online banking will likely use proprietary software for the foreseeable future.

Financial institutions, and government institutions, etc. will mostly be using proprietary operating systems for exactly this reason. By not teaching how they work (to a novice/intermediate level, not kernel specifics!) you preclude your students from taking most roles in such organisations. I'm not saying it's good that public services rely on private business, but it is naive to ignore it.

Why do you feel that way? if photoshop was free, would you be okay with it?

Do you think kids should only be exposed to free software for their whole lives and then enter the real world with no hands-on experience with anything enterprise?

Should they be allowed to require reading copyrighted books in English class? Or only public domain books?

What about their graphing calculator? Only open source graphing calculators?

I don't think donated software should be allowed either. It's a brilliant investment for companies to donate their software to schools and almost everything has a "free for educational purposes" version.

Why are you using garage band in a music class? That sounds like using ms paint in a graphic design class.

That is not the point. Understand what OP is trying to say.

Photoshop is legitimate for graphic design - right? Should we stop teaching that at school? Or Autocad or its ilk.

Public schools should not have a graphic design class, nor a CAD class. Unless you are talking about outside of the USA and the notion that all schools are public.

What? I definitely learned Photoshop, CAD, Dreamweaver, Office (and several PCB design software suites I no longer remember) when I was in a USA high school 10-14 years ago. My younger siblings learned far more than that too a few years later (accounting software, Eclipse, and a video editing application if I recall correctly). That's completely normal depending on what electives you take.

Am I misunderstanding this comment?

Why not? We had both of those at my high school (in suburban DC) and they were well enrolled and enjoyed by those who took them. They were electives - we all still took a full load of social studies, hard science, math, etc.

I agree. We shouldn't teach free software either. Teach the principals behind it and the software is a detail.

That sounds about as useful as teaching the principles behind riding a bicycle without giving students a chance to actually practice on the real thing.

Practice is required or course. I've ridden bicycles with coaster bikes (pedal backward to stop) and rim brakes (maybe called something else?). I've seen disk brakes, and fixed pedal bikes - even though I've never been on either I expect that I could ride and stop one.

Schools should have a number of different programs available and students should use several different ones. It is fine to have a favorite, but you should be able to use any without specific instruction.

Teach students to type (QWERTY is standard enough to teach even if dvorak might be better). Teach them to save early and often. There is nothing magical about that. Spend more of the time teaching grammar, spelling, reviewing rough drafts, and the other timeless principals that will never change.

That's a pretty good analogue, given that bicycles are proprietary.

What? The bicycle design is not proprietary.

Not the design, no, but bicycles themselves are trademarked and sold as a product. It's a free-as-in-beer problem rather than free-as-in-freedom.

What happens on the off chance you do find yourself having no alternatives? Or worse, having a free alternative that is so much worse than the proprietary, paid one?

Invest some taxpayer money into making a free alternative, I'd say. Or just not teach that software. If companies require the use of proprietary software without alternatives they can pay the money to train people to use it.

I’m bot saying it’s not an option but I imagine the result is not necessarily a better one. The right tools for the job don’t necessarily have to be free or open source. That’s just the best case scenario.

So schools should stop using tools that are useful in the actual real world? Ok, sounds like a great education. Instead of Photoshop, everyone can learn Gimp, instead of Word they can learn LibreOffice. Then when they fail to get a job because they have no idea how to use an Excel spreadsheet we'll chalk that up as a win for a free society, or something.

People will argue, well companies will just adjust and not use Office...no they won't. Switching costs are expensive, retraining is expensive, and let's face it Office is just better.

Interesting. That way we have to dismantle everything - bridges, buildings, power plants,...

All of these spent tax payers money for some 'proprietary' machines, 'proprietary' engineering knowledge, and others..

Bridges, buildings and power plants are not schools. We don't allow companies to place ads in schools for good reasons. Why should we train people to use their products for free?

Because these products are well designed and built - 100% value for money.

Many school students aspire to work in the companies which build these software, or go and work in places where these software are used and those companies expect students to know these.

> Because these products are well designed and built

You've obviously never tried to use Office 365

it's a fair point worth debating. Should we as a society bankroll the marketing for companies? Imagine how people would recoil at the thought of cigarette companies having access to schools in that way.

I don't know that I fully agree with the premise, but it does have merit.

Turkey got few steps further:

Almost all ready made software recently become practically illegal to obtain in government tenders in Turkey due to "usability guarantee" requirement. Exact article translated (from the presidential administrative decree):

  All software and hardware contractors working for
  Turkish government shall provide a guarantee stating
  said soft/hard-ware does not contain backdoors and/or
  features unfit for intended use, as far as possible.

Servers for goverment services are also required to be in Turkey, even if it is not possible to set up one in situ in the respective institution. This goes so far to require all data processor to have their own or peered IXPs situated in Turkey.

So what do they use? Linux with LibreOffice?

I think both of those explicitly denounce any expectation of a fitness for any particular purpose in their licence, so if anything they'll be going backwards (according to their metric)

This applies going forward, not retroactively (Turkish constitution prohibits retroactive laws, except for pardoning or release of criminals). There is an "as far as possible" clause grandfathering former procurements and enabling the administration to make a case-by-case exemption.

Sure, but that's just the license. If an ISV makes a support contract with them, they can include the necessary clauses in that contract.

Usability and fitness can only be guaranteed by original author. Others can only test and report it.

Amusing. That's the data protection agency responsible for Schufa (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schufa), which 15 of 16 German data protection agencies agree is breaking every relevant German data protection law. For some reason they disagree / are very lenient in their handling of Schufa. Maybe Microsoft should move their German HQ to Frankfurt or Wiesbaden.

(To make this clear: I think this is a good decision, but they are still hypocrites)

It's one of sixteen states. Office 365 (and Windows 10) have been identified as not being able to be used in accordance with data privacy laws in Germany time and time again. So far, nobody got fined for using either software yet.

Do you know any authorities using Windows 10 who handle personal data? Last I looked the BSI (Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik) hasn't blessed Windows 10 as appropriate over battles with MS on telemetry.

Munich is switching away from Limux towards Windows 10, which I assume also includes workstations that handle PII.

I'd be very surprised to find any authorities using such a recent version of Windows.

Maybe it's a start.

It gets interesting. Of the three OS vendors - MS, Google, and Apple - only the latter made the effort to choose the privacy path, whereas the other two basically have a contemptuous attitude towards privacy expectations of their users. Times change, though, and we're likely to witness some interesting changes.

Having heard M$ executives talk about Office, I was somewhere between shocked, horrified and appalled at the enthusiasm with which they talked about mining (Office) user data to offer "intelligent" features. Absolutely zero concern about possible privacy issues. Not even on the radar.

They don't let you disable their spying on Windows 10, why would they treat Office any differently?

I remember when a weather app using your GPS to automatically change to your current location was controversial. Now we willingly subject ourselves to corporate spying at the OS level.

When you install or activate Windows 10 there is a step during the process where they ask you what of the telemetry to enable or disable. Everyone, outside corp environments where the corp decides, goes through this process. The settings are available to change later, oo.

Why do you say they don't let you disable the telemetry for Windows 10? Honest question.

That setup process says things like "Send detailed information to Microsoft. Disabling this sends only basic data." There is no setting for not sending any data.

They also add new settings using Windows Update which you're not prompted about and which default to on, which would presumably then send information between when the update installs and when you realize it's there, even assuming you're diligent enough to notice it at all as most people obviously aren't.

The title makes it sound like this is a Germany wide thing. It's 'only' the state of Hesse which is around 6 million people. The responsibility for the education system in Germany lies primarily with the states.

I wish this sense of German/European sensibleness w.r.t. things digital could be transplanted into America. I'm really quite jealous of it.

I guess it already is being done. US citizens must also be benefitting from stuff like GDPR. It does not sound sensible for companies to implement it and then wilfully exclude US citizens. I think often times companies will just comply with all data protection rules globally for everyone.

> US citizens must also be benefitting from stuff like GDPR.

My benefit so far has been countless popups that either offer a "take it or leave it" Accept button with no other options, or a link to tens of thousands of pages of legal contracts detailing the service terms of hundreds of "partners". None of these sites really seem GDPR compliant to me at all, and I'm talking about EU based sites.

US based sites are easier. Either do like here on HN and have no popup or notice or terms at all, just rightly ignoring the law which is in a foreign jurisdiction not controlled by treaty and which legally has absolutely no bearing. Or do ip block level shutdowns of access with a 451 code response, as well as adding to the TOS that those in EU jurisdiction are not permitted to use the site.

A win for everyone.

You seem entirely too gleeful about users' privacy getting violated. Very far from "a win for everybody".

It seems the simple solution for Microsoft is to just stand up a data center in Germany again. The simple solution for the rest of the software world is to let people choose where their data is stored. I wrote about this earlier today: https://blog.graphitedocs.com/the-simple-way-to-remain-gdpr-...

Again? https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/global-infrastructure/germ...

This has been discontinued: https://news.microsoft.com/europe/2018/08/31/microsoft-to-de...

As an outsider looking in (from the US), what is the difference between the current Azure Germany vs the new locations they're standing up in Berlin and Frankfurt?

Frankly, I don't understand the point of the last 3 paragraphs of this announcment.

The difference is that the discontinued data center was run independently by a German company (T-Systems IIRC). MS engineered the contracts in such a way that they had no ability to access anything in this data center. That made it exclusive subject to German law. As I see it, the new data centers are run by MS directly and thus an entity that is subject to US laws and their far reaching clauses.

Azure is not office products, do you assume because they are both Microsoft products that it would be feasible or easy to use facilities designed for Azure and also use them for handling Office products?

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