Italian universities started to sell students' privacy to big corps through email accounts

[Andrea Di Dato]

Il 22 agosto 2015 10:34:24 CEST, Valentino Santori <vfvs at riseup.net> ha scritto:
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>Hi fellows,
>
>I would like to report a very bad situation for student's privacy in
>the public education system, here in Italy. Many universities, and as
>far as I know even high schools, are migrating from self-hosted mail
>servers to propietary, big-corp's owned email accounts. This without
>any chance to refuse the creation of this account, because this is
>created during the subscription to the faculty, and without any
>privacy agreement.
>
>I can report my personal experience and others I know:
>Università Politecnica delle Marche (located in Ancona) used to adopt
>a self-hosted Squirrelmail soultion, now It's migrating to Microsoft
>Hotmail;
>Università degli studi di Ferrara is using Gmail;
>Università degli studi di Parma is using Gmail;
>Università degli studi di Bologna is using Microsoft Hotmail.
>
>In Italy laws are very strict in terms on privacy and I think that
>since we are talking about a public service this issue It's even more
>serious.
>What's your opinion about? Can we move somehow?
>
>Valentino Santori


I try to give you some motivation that often bring such institutions to make the choice to externalize some services, core ones too, as per e-mail.

Apart for reasons connected to historic factors, open contract and partnership, side interpretation of reports (cfr Pesaro municipality some days ago), there are two main reasons a PA may take such a decision: cuts to ordinary founds (FFO) and cuts to staff employee.

Those two factors, in the short period, bring an IT manager to realize that he cannot anymore supervise to time consuming tasks like administration of servers needed to operate common site services (web, e-mail, shared archives, etc.) because anyone can anymore nowadays assure to him the needed financial resources to maintain such services year by year and moreover very probably he/she is alone to administer those services because all his/her colleagues retired, haven't been replaced (due to the stop of the turnover).

The solution: externalisation!
The life motif of the PA in Italy today :-(

So, even though there are laws that prevent you to do it, there are others who, in a sense, force you to do so. 


    Andrea



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