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

[xdrudis at tinet.cat]

Yes, it's bad and I fear it's widespread. 

I think I once heard Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya students
have gmail accounts (that look like UPC mail, but it's handled by
Google). It's hearsay, I don't know the exact situation now, or
whether it's optional, or how are they informed or how do they consent
if at all.

What I know is that last year I tried to enter a course in a private
university in Barcelona (Blanquerna-la Salle) intended to make
engineers, etc. high school teachers for "technical" subjects/studies.
They opened each student an account in two virtual campus servers
(presumably in the University) but required a gmail account for each
student, and a teacher also required students to have a twitter
account and a facebook account to do an exercise, because "one can't
be a technology teacher if one isn't in facebook and twitter". I was
there only a few days, so I don't know what else.

But the impression I got was that the thoughtlessness in the
requirements (both from teachers, staff and students) was even more
frightening than the requirements themselves. Students were complaining
that they needed to check three different accounts and two websites to
be aware of schedule changes, assignments or readings or so on, and
felt this was too much trouble, but I was the only one complaining of
the fact that they had to be customers of arbitrary companies or
accept third party terms of use in order to complete a master.

Good luck out there.

-- 
Xavi Drudis Ferran
xdrudis at tinet.cat