Denmark bans Gmail and Co from schools due to privacy concerns
tutanota.com
tutanota.com
But only one local county have been forbidden from processing personal data on school chromebooks as they did not do any analysis of the consequences.
https://www-datatilsynet-dk.translate.goog/afgoerelser/afgoe...
Title seems dramatized, not surprising when it’s a blog post from a competitor eager to sell a replacement to said schools. Probably should switch to a better source.
Everything is outsourced to private companies. That's how economics works.
We should not use schools to further the vendor-lock-in of corporations.
I think a better formulation of this would be following. School is obligatory, we should not employ products that collect private information of students.
Schools classically self hosted their network services and they can do so again. It is a good opportunity to mentor future sysadmins too.
> Schools classically self hosted their network services
Back when encryption wasn't even needed, hackers were a curiosity and deliverability wasn't a concern. This is never coming back. School is a very important part of people's lives (parents, children, teachers, other staff), deliverability and security must be perfect.
Schools also manage loads of very private data. As a parent, I don't want the school admin to touch it with a 10-meter pole, I want them to use a managed service that they can't screw up even if they tried very hard (and sometimes school admins look at data themselves - the less opportunity they have the better).
> It is a good opportunity to mentor future sysadmins too.
The point is to have working email that everyone can rely on, not to groom kids/teachers to become sysadmins. It's better for everyone if the school admin focuses on solving things no one else can solve (e.g. handing out the free computers and installing Linux on them) rather than wasting time tinkering with email hosting for public money.
Protonmail is one. Free version includes much more than what a student needs. Students can sign up themselves.
You can't rely on students having their own inboxes anyways. They will claim they forgot the password, it doesn't work, they are not getting teacher's messages, etc etc. You need a place where you can deliver critical information and be sure it arrived, and have a way of proving it was/wasn't read, a way of restoring lost access (without losing the messages), a way of proving that access is possible and happened, a way of recovering deleted messages...
Edit: After choosing something different than the school suggests, the pupils then themselves become responsible for making sure it is a suitable alternative to the non-proprietary ethical solution, that the school suggested.
Pupils' personal email inbox is their own stuff and completely out of the question. We're talking about school-managed inboxes with addresses ending with the school's domain.
The sheer market manipulation these companies do is obscene, there really isn't competition, and our kids aren't offered the high quality and respectful services they deserve. In the case of Texas instruments, parents will have their pockets robbed. Thing cost my parents 200 bucks, and the only thing it was used for, was rendering some fancy parabolas.
Anyways, I didn't mean to throw private contracts out the window completely. And, have since clarified that in another reply to this thread.
That's because it's a lucrative market you can take with much less negotiation than individual small companies. Every company does that, only few are dealing with the government on the level of Microsoft/Google though.
> I had to buy a nspire calculator for example, since teachers received commissions for the damn things (while in obligatory school).
That sucks, but this is about schools buying Gmail for students' school managed inboxes on the school domain, not about students being forced to use Gmail. This is just like internal company email for example. Students still have their own personal inboxes at whatever service they please.
> The sheer market manipulation these companies do is obscene, there really isn't competition
If there isn't competition, then it's not market manipulation, it's just that they're the only market.
> and our kids aren't offered the high quality and respectful services they deserve
Gmail (and Outlook365) is the highest quality service currently on the market, and since the school is paying for the inbox, Google is not reading the data for ads. You can go for smaller companies with worse offers and much less software included in the subscribtion... But I don't think that's going to be a benefit to the students.
> Thing cost my parents 200 bucks, and the only thing it was used for, was rendering some fancy parabolas.
Again, that sucks, but this is not about parents paying Gmail.
This isn't just like an internal company email, and I am not saying this is their personal email. Like you're trying to imply.
These companies are trying to create habits and gain trust from naive kids. Making them their future clients. This creates a neverending circle, and the ones inside of it are so blinded, that'll always turn an eye to alternatives. In a space like this, its near impossible for other companies yo gain an edge, even if their product is better. It forms a rather powerful emotional allegiance to them, and their products.
Our kids should never be their clients, simply by the fact that their moral compass doesn't adhere to the simplest of market rules, and common sense. They undermine capitalism, they undermine freedom. And if you can't see this, you're blind.
I'd agree with the parent that schools shouldn't be getting kids to use things like GSuite, but not solely because it's commercial - the problem is the data management practices of these companies, which the state should not be supporting by forcing children to use these services to complete their education and inevitably giving companies like Google huge amounts of personal data.
This isn't a problem with textbooks, commercial or otherwise.
> For the years ended March 31, 2020 and 2019, K-12 traditional print represented 59% ($353 million) and 63% ($357 million) of total K-12 revenue, respectively.
> In the K-12 market in the United States,...We sell our learning solutions directly to school districts across the United States.
This is less true at the university level, since students typically have to pay for their own textbooks, but scholarships, grants, and loans, and other public money sources that go to students are used to cover those costs.
Source: McGraw Hill's 2020 Annual Report https://www.annualreports.com/HostedData/AnnualReports/PDF/N...
Individual schools in Portugal (as well as where I live, and in the US) are buying books on the market, and the books are competing on it - just writing a textbook doesn't guarantee any school will buy it, it's a risk - and that's great because it means the writers have to make good books and there's a lot of choice and many different styles and price levels.
That's very different from "textbooks paid for by public money" as if the state funded its creation and thus owned the copyright while de-risking it for the authors - meaning paid their salary. EU occasionally provides funding to authors and they're explicit about the writers owning their copyright, because the point is to support their independence. So suggesting moving a work into public domain just because a public school bought it is... weird. Why books and not other education equipment, e.g. chemistry/physics/electronics sets? What about educational software?
Imagine a school bought a book you wrote about programming/whatever you do (the school where I went did that a lot with many different books from small-time authors that were used as textbooks during lessons), should it suddenly become public domain just because some of the money someone spent on it came from taxes? I think that's very broken.
Public schools aren't the only ones buying textbooks anyways. There's a very healthy market of private schools, and I know of textbooks catered specifically to them, some of them even funded by them, that are then also bought by public schools. There's also homeschooling, alternative non-public non-profit schools, etc. Sometimes people buy textbooks by themselves, e.g. adults who want to (re-)learn, parents who think the books provided by school are inadequate, children who destroyed the copy they received at school...
That textbooks are "paid for by public money" is reductio ad absurdum. The system is much more complex. However, I think that the state/EU (or US) should also fund textbooks and put them into the public domain, as long as using them isn't mandatory - that's a great idea and it never hurts to have one more option.
As long as there is a public competition, and the decision is well formed, intended and transmitted transparently, there shouldn't be a problem.
There have been two rulings regarding this particular municipality. First, they were investigated due to a data breach (personally-identifiable information was shared between G-suite and Youtube). This breach lead Datatilsynet (the Danish Data Protection Agency) to investigate the municipality and conclude they hadn't done their due diligence in investigating privacy implication of the setup.
This forced the municipality to perform a through investigation of the privacy issues. Their findings in turn lead Datatilsynet to ban further use of G-suite an Chromebooks (in the municipality) because they found more serious issues, for example they couldn't guarantee private information was not shared with unsafe countries.
The choice of software and hardware is decided by each municipality, so there will be no nationwide ban as such. But underlying privacy problems will be the same for other municipalities which use the same software.
Google have some setup where the data is stored in the EU (Ireland) and allegedly the encryption key is only available to the Ireland branch of Google and not the US branch. But the setup is still accessed by personnel from the US branch.
> Recently, Datatilsynet (the Danish Data Protection Authority) issued a ruling emphasizing the importance of conducting proper due diligence before implementing cloud services. We agree due diligence is an important step for customers since privacy assessments and outcomes can vary significantly based on the way customers have configured their system. Although this ruling is limited to Helsingør Municipality, it may be of interest to other Danish controllers. To be clear, the ruling does not apply to Google directly or to other customers, nor does it prohibit use of Google Workspace for Education or Chromebooks in Denmark.
Long story short, she claims this will have far-reaching consequences not just for Elsinore, but for other school districs as well.
Elsinore did, indeed, do an analysis, which is clearly stated in the report: https://www.datatilsynet.dk/afgoerelser/afgoerelser/2022/jul... (also in Danish -- translator link in a sibling comment)
The main points are that Elsinore concluded that the risks with using Google Workspace are low, but that it cannot be guaranteed that US authorities won't be able to get hold of the data. In order to be allowed to use Google Workspace, Elsinore must re-evaluate that position and be absolutely sure that such leaks cannot happen. This is the part that might have far-reaching consequences, since Elsinore -- and many others -- don't see that as possible.
I'm in no way an expert when it comes to GDPR, but there's a lot of people who're quite upset about this, since it means any school using Google Workspace is expected to prove data transfer to non-EU entities isn't possible without adequate protection.
GDPR is EU law. And unless some super lawyer shows up from Helsingørs kommune or more likely from Google then this goes not only for Denmark but the rest of the EU as well.
Normally a seller of a piece of software to an institution would provide the documentation, if nedeed, that the piece of software follows GDPR.
Now with Google, Helsingør likely gets the software for free. And Google takes the data and use it for targeting advertisement and maybe other things.
Personally I think the school system in Denmark should only use suppliers with a straight-forward pay and use business model.
Much in the same way I don't think our children's text books should contain advertisement or be sponsored by business or political interests.
Was Gmail banned in Denmark schools? Obviously not, there is some regulation in one of the counties and it was about chromebook usage because of some privacy concerns. One. County.
Article is written by a company which is a direct competitor of Gmail (they are email service too) and are apparently searching for some topic they can use to get some publicity. Nothing bad in itself, but lies are lame.
And no, nobody is going to switch from Gmail to tutanota, because nobody wants mediocre user interface, be unable to search emails and force others to use some particular service to decrypt emails.
Even with encrypted emails, that's just the beginning of the privacy story. If I am sending encrypted email to Bin Laden or to abortion clinics it does not help much that the content is encrypted.
Is Gmail your idea of a good user interface? How many ordinaty people can setup filters to direct email from a prticular sender to a particular folder? Why can't I right click on an email and add it to a specific rule?
"be unable to search emails"
The mobile Gmail app fails at search, if my latest email has a word in it, typing in that word into searchbar returns nothing. I had to switch to outlook, ironically
"Even with encrypted emails, that's just the beginning of the privacy story."
I can get bank statements or medical records by post, they are confidential and are accepted by every court in the land.
I can't get a bank statement by email and every email will be subject to 'is this real, did he really send it'. Its bear i possible to prove.
so I think we've failed as an industry here
Yeah, actually. Mail storage/search is not a solved problem. I recently trained an executive assistant to use ediscovery tools because the person she supports has too many mails to be indexed.
Do yourself a favor and delete as much as possible before it all runs away from you. Stop using email as a system of record now or you will really wish you did later on. Sounds like you might have crossed that point recently.
Do you keep your paper bank statements directly in your mailbox or do you move them to a filing cabinet? Likewise, you should download your records from the bank's site and store them in a real filesystem, not some subfolder of your inbox.
If I take an email and save it to a file system, and delete ir from the mailbox, there is no evidence of anything.
& you might actually be surprised. I used to have an insurer on my roster that ran all policyholder emails through a pdf printer into their DMS and that apparently was good enough for the courts to accept as policyholder statements.
Do you know if there is any sort of consensus on this topic on how to do it?
It looks like a very popular belief, but do anyone actually knows how to think, and even more, how to teach how to think without making it just a different kind of propaganda?
It follows a few steps: teach the scientific process, analyze analogies to whatever it is you're approaching, identify appropriate and relevant sources for information and how to assess their reliability/trustworthiness, identify biases including self-biases, and fostering open-mindedness and an ability to evaluate points from multiple perspectives.
When you are critically thinking about things, these are the steps you take - quickly, and not in any order that you can identify. But you are doing that.
That being said, because these are higher order, abstract skills for the most part, they are very hard to apply across disciplines. You need a level of base knowledge of the area to be able to sort through these steps appropriately. For example, it is easy for me to analyze statements and assess articles related to farming, education, and depression, because I have massive experience with these things. Whereas, I absolutely could not even get through evaluating appropriate sources when it comes to programming languages; I have no experience with them.
In other words, it is possible, but it takes a concerted effort in nearly every aspect of the child's life. This is not something we can do JUST in the classroom, especially when parents, often, do not want true critical reasoning in their children; my experience is that if a child can do this effectively s/he is very difficult to keep 'under control'.
That is how to think about office documents. Once you know what you want to do any tool can do that.
Robert Fulghum figured it out decades ago.
The teacher should were two message buttons on their shirt:
"Trust me; I'm the teacher"
"Question Authority"
The goal of school is not to derail kids’ education by making them wrestle with self hosted sys admin nuances and failures.
This was actually extremely unique - in france at the time, finding schools teaching any sort of computer skills, especially to young children, let alone *online*, was basically impossible. But I remember it very vividly. I don't know if the skills "learned" at that time had any influence on me, or ended up being useful (I probably would have figured them out eventually), but… I can't be sure, and the point is, it was I think a great thing.
I am an open source activist whenever I can. But saying schools have "no place supporting or teaching proprietary software" is extremely off-base, simply because the world is made of proprietary software and schools should be able to teach the reality of the world to children, teenagers and young adults.
Schools teach using proprietary books, and every piece of equipment in a school, from a projector to a powertool is proprietary too.
I am not against the idea, but I am just pointing out it gors against the grain of current customs and norms.
This line of thinking is poison and will only amplify the monopolisic power of whatever select companies make the taught-in-schools list.
Proprietary technology has no place in educational institutions.
2. Schools shouldn’t be trying to be in charge of shaping corporations. That isn’t and shouldn’t be a goal of teaching children.
3. That’s an arbitrary opinion you have. No text books either then? No published novels? No proprietary informational videos? Yes you COULD teach without these, but you would deliver a subpar experience. I’d again argue that schools shouldn’t be focusing on trying to push these moral ideals, they should be focusing on preparing our children for contributing to society in adulthood as much as possible.
In a marketing class, you absolutely would have to involve social media, otherwise your class would be outdated bunk. Traditional advertising doesn't work on new generation platforms. And billboards, TV ads, and magazine ads are expensive, inefficient, poorly targeted advertising, for all but the wealthiest behemoths of companies.
The same methods behind TV ads don't translate to social media ads. Social media ads aren't just trimmed down traditional ads.
Teaching the concept of spreadsheets is totally possible without teaching students products of whatever specific corporation donates the most money or free licenses.
Libre also has different features than Excel which has different features than Sheets, etc, but Excel is the "standard". You're going to see Excel far more than Sheets in the workplace and I've never seen a job listing mention Libre Calc.
I know Excel, I started at a startup 4 months ago using Sheets, the first few weeks I had to 'unlearn' half of what I knew and try and figure out how to do similar in Sheets. If I only knew sheets, I'd probably have been even more lost going to Excel because Microsoft doesn't hold your hand like Sheets does with every formula you start to type. I'm guessing something like Libre Calc is worse than Excel and Sheets in that regard.
>Teaching the concept of spreadsheets is totally possible
Sure, but teaching someone to drive a 4-cylinder automatic driver's ed car doesn't prepare them to say operate a manual tri-axle or a an excavator. Sure they understand steering, acceleration and stopping, but all of the unique mechanics of say Excel are different than random free software.
Nothing at the level students do spreadsheets is different between spreadsheet programs
Pretty sure this is how we wound up where we are.
The hard thing is to find the book (with the information you want) and not reading the book itself (that was before google/inet)
"Office proficiency" is a useful thing to have, and while it is taken for granted by the older generations, it is being a challenge for people joining the workforce now (it's an actual issue, hiring managers are having trouble with this)
As in: people can't write a simple text, set a phrase in bold, set the title with a different font size, etc. Or how to do some basic spreadsheet with simple calculations
The mostly pro TikTok comments here when news of it being banned indicates YES.
The point is to not pay Microsoft money to promote Microsoft's continued monopoly, which will mean you have to pay them money again next year.
Any school paying for closed source software when they could be funding a company to make open source software is doing it wrong. Same with textbooks.
100s of 1000s of schools all paying for something they won't own and will have to pay for again in the future.
Modern IDEs are not at all required for success in this industry. They can sometimes even be a crutch.
I still teach people Vim. Some learn other things later but the important thing is they have a fast and free baseline available in every package manager.
Someone who can write elisp macros and have muscle memories for complex actions won’t be bothered with VS or VS code at all.
The other way around however…
(Nothing really compares to Excel in some of its most terrible bugs either).
Excel has COM automation going back to the old days; from many programming languages on Windows you can instantiate "Excel.Application" and then script it as if you were using the GUI - and have the GUI visible and showing you what is happening. Add workbooks, worksheets, select ranges, copy/paste, enter formulae and get their results, apply formatting, etc. Because it plugs into Windows' COM system, you don't need to download an Office SDK or Excel-specific library for your language to use it, any language which can talk to COM can do it, including VBScript, PowerShell, Python with PyWin32, JavaScript/TypeScript, C#, etc.
If you save an Excel document on a SharePoint (Office365) site, then multiple people can open it. When they do that, it's a multiplayer spreadsheet - you see who else has the document open, which cell(s) they are looking at, changes betewen all people are propagated in approximately realtime.
If you save an Excel document on an (Office365) site then Office365 has visibility into it, which means if someone else opens it, @tags you in a comment on a cell, Office365 will pick that up and email it to you for your attention.
Excel documents saved on O365 can be opened in a web browser, in a JavaScript version of Excel which has fewer features but can still join in with the above.
Excel documents saved on O365 are visible in the MSGraph API, for scripting with REST endpoints[2]
People who have been working in Silicon Valley, for FAANG companies, as software developers, pushing us all to the cloud for ten to twenty years, still thinking that Excel vs LibreOffice is a matter of a desktop program showing a grid you can put some numbers in and do sum or average, and whether you can bold or align the text, are experiencing some kind of cognitive dissonance.
Your CRUD app can now be a spreadsheet someone in HR opens, enters an employee code, and a script against the MSGraph API which offboards them, and if it hasn't worked the HR person can @ you in a comment. There goes all your custom CRUD UI, database backend, network connectivity, compiling, deployment, authorization, there's your "no code" or "low code" Excel as frontend for a small business.
Want to script a report for HR to look at? Thinking of downloading a JDK and PDF library for Java and asking for SMTP relay settings? Script MSGraph to make an Excel spreadsheet directly in a folder HR can see. A poor solution for a big business, a quick and relatively easy solution for a small business with an admin and a PowerShell script.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32116088#32129830
[2] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/resources/excel?v...
I’m sure there are some genuine Excel experts out there doing important work but I’ve got to assume most of what’s being done is formulas, charts and pivot tables.
Schools should not use the non-free products even if Microsoft provided them for free to them (which they did or do), because it is a Trojan Horse into kid's minds in order to create soft dependencies. People who learned to use one office suite are rarely motivated to learn yet another one.
I'm actually not even sure what I would gain by switching to actual Excel.
Excel is really difficult to use now.
I don’t imagine moving from libreoffice calc to excel would be easy.
The approaches to teaching can vary quite wildly. My mother was doing some resume padding when I was in middle school, so I got to compare what they were teaching with what my school was teaching. They were teaching rote skills with a separate book directed towards each product, which is to say Word had a book full of screenshots illustrating procedures and WordPerfect had its own book full of screenshots illustrating procedures. They were not laying down the foundations for transferrable skills, nor did they expect students to pick it up. In contrast, my middle school was using obsolete computers and had no expectation the software would be used in business. The emphasis was directed towards laying out and formatting documents instead, which had a much longer lasting impact.
I would argue it is far more helpful for 80%+ of kids to learn excel than to learn advanced maths.
There are many free implementations of spreadsheet software. Kids can get even more experience using different kinds of software, teaching them ways in which software can differ while still being able to do the same things. Ironically, this would probably make kids more skilled with MS Excel, if they were ever forced to use it.
There's no reason to teach kids MS Excel in particular, unless you think memorizing positions of buttons is a useful skill in the real world.
If 100% of a country's schools start teaching software from company A, thats a massive subsidy - basically 100% of the population will know how to use their software and prefer it to their competitors. Businesses will buy that software because everyone already knows it. You are massively distorting free market.
With a conoany thats already a monopoly, thats doubly unfair.
Any e-mail providers based out of the EU, worth mentioning?
And for documents, LibreOffice is quite good these days.
What alternatives are out there without service degradation/outages?
Also not to undermine my own point (Protonmail is wonderfully stable for me) who is getting life or death emails these days? I could take whole days of downtime (hasn't ever happened) and probably be OK.
Why do we all pretend that we are all so important that we need services with bulletproof reliability and as many 9s as we can get?
Bit of a rant, but not directed at you so much Cxckers!
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/w0vcge/email_fr...
But you are right, no service is bulletproof
[1] https://www.robinwhittleton.com/2018/02/18/dropping-g-suite/
Like, if I ditched MS 365, I would have to find alternatives for:
- Exchange (Email)
- Azure AD (Directory Service with SSO integration)
- SharePoint/ OneDrive (shared / personal file server)
- Teams (chat / conferencing)
- Intune (MDM)
For about 20 USD/user/month* .That's just the surface, I'm definitely forgetting about many other features. M365 is just too good for small business.
And even then, I would have to pay for some O365 subscriptions as many of my users rely heavily in Excel.
*That can be made cheaper by buying through a MS partner + yearly commitments.
I'm absolutely all for privacy, but I also wonder if the EU alternatives (e.g. Tutanota as per article) will be able to withstand e.g. state sponsored attacks as well as Google.
I know we all love to hate Google, but my impression is they take the privacy of email extremely seriously at this point (eg, no longer using it for ads).
Sure, I don't trust Google that much and I know others trust their brand even less, but is there hard evidence of misuse of Gmail user data?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2021/10/04/googl...
US citizens should take careful note of the fact their data is only usefully constitutionally protected if it is hosted at home.
It's a similar model to GitHub.
Yes, the Snowden leaks.
It doesn't matter whether Google themselves takes privacy seriously, they are a US company and therefor when handling personal information we must always assume that everything that is uploaded to their servers is sent straight to the NSA as well. Because that's what US law allows for.
I'm not even exaggerating, according to the latest rulings by EDPB, storing personal information on US servers is pretty much always forbidden unless you store it in encrypted form and control the encryption key.
The issue is that the US government is entitled access to all data hosted by US companies. This means data hosted by a US company is not safe according to GDPR.
Does any one know the reason for this -- was there ever a good description given by someone technical on the project as to why it worked out that way? All I can imagine is malice/ill-intent and I'd like to be wrong. It just seems so unlikely that somehow it was cheaper/easier to have the hardware not boot linux.
I remember seeing the chromebook story on HN lately[0][1] and I was kind of disgusted by it. The technical aspects might be great, but completely beside the point that those machines are basically on-ramps to google's surveillance ecosystem.
I can only think of them as the hardware version of Facebook's internet.org push -- If a whole generation grows up to think that running programs is launching domains that end in google.com, who benefits? Maybe a whole new generation will have easier access to VS Code and be able to build cool new stuff, and they'll run linux in VMs/crostini or whatever, but I can't fight the nagging feeling that a bunch of people will just stick with consumption. Figuring out how to install a program was hard, but it engendered a feeling of self-determination and control. Seems like Google wants to build the WALL-E future.
All that said, in recent memory this world has also produced:
- System76
- Framework
- Pinebook
- RISCV
- Tons of SBCs that are more and more performant and can function as full blown computing devices for cheap
And Google makes huge contributions (monetary and otherwise) to open source software and hardware, organizations, and projects.
Are things good or bad? Yes, I guess.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32198762
[1]: https://mobile.twitter.com/timsneath/status/1550598445248811...
https://mrchromebox.tech/#devices
No reasoning is provided. If you’re curious, I sure you could contact the author for clarification.
Which EU company will soon get a multi-billion dollar fine by the US government?
For all those people suggesting OSS alternatives, it is difficult. Finding talent (yes, the govt jobs do not pay like private) to install, run, maintain suite of office-based is close to impossible. They tried at our school - as the board tried to ban Teams while they chat in WhatsApp or zoom meetings. We tried SoGo (OSS) calendar - it just sucks. Sync does not happen. The solution always is to restart phone or try later.
These may work for individuals. Not for organisations unless huge number of talent moves to OSS type organisations (tutanota or etc).
In English, "& co." is used pretty much exclusively about people, whereas in German it's used literally everywhere, basically meaning "a category of things of which [this] is a famous example."
I would sub “all Google cloud services” in for “Gmail and Co” if I were writing this headline (or just “Gmail” and mention the other stuff that was banned in the article.)
> Danish schools must stop using Google's email and cloud services
In the first sentence of the first paragraph.
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children%27s_Online_Privacy_Pr...
(2) https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/27/18243312/tiktok-ftc-fine-...
Like the 4th post about this news from almost 2 weeks ago
What is your evidence for that? It could be any privacy-conscious individual which have raised the issue to Datatilsynet. Believe it or nor, some people actually care about the safety of their kids' private information.
It will probably require some work and won't be as polished, but there are totally ways have all of that within the EU.
Will be fun if you're a school that just bought 1000 Chromebooks.
My guess is that within a few years (or even sooner), you will be reading about a massive breach of student data from whatever alternative they choose to go with.
if if it's just that, it's pretty easy to solve, don't you think so? The EU is leading on privacy, no doubt, or better: the EU is (finally, and really a bit too late) doing something while, afaik, the US is almost doing nothing (except for CA).
I hope the EU is able to slowly write down easy to implement rules other countries can just cut & paste
The EU members get all of the privacy downsides and none of the financial upside from the American behemoths hence the legislative gymnastics to find them for $N millions every quarter and now further protectionist moves.
If Google set up a subsidiary in Europe, that ran the service for european users and was the only entity that had access to the data, this would not be a problem. The problem here is Google's insistence that US entities will be allowed to access european data.
Same can be said of American protectionism. TikTok being the prime example.