Adi Kamdar, the President of Yale Students for Free Culture, was recently featured on the BBC for a story about Yale’s switch to Google Apps for services such as GMail. The change to cloud computing, especially at the education level, raises important questions about autonomy, privacy and functionality. Adi and his chapter have been raising public awareness through venues such as an opinion piece in the student newspaper:

And for all the benefits of Gmail, there are some very real concerns. As students, we need to know that Yale has signed a contract with Google guaranteeing certain provisions. Right now, the transition to Gmail depends on Google’s generosity to provide this service without cost or advertisements. If Google decides to charge in the future, what are the ramifications for Yale? We have not heard how much control, if any, ITS and the University will have over backups, data security and migration. We don’t know where the Gmail servers will be located and what privacy protections legally apply in that jurisdiction. At Brown, for instance, mail can be stored in “datacenters outside the borders of the United States” according to the university’s Web site. In addition, no one has told us how much access Google and its data mining algorithms will have to Yale e-mail. Even if Google and ITS do have all the answers, we are entitled to at least ask the questions.

To listen to the BBC piece on the topic, check out their site within the next week or Adi’s blog.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 18th, 2010 at 10:31 am and is filed under Chapter News, Education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.