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Article is in Danish. Anyone know why they were banned?
by kar5pt 4y ago
Article is in Danish. Anyone know why they were banned?
- mbreese 4y agoEarlier discussion: Danish DPA bans Google Workspace for municipalities https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32108164 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32108164
- hedgehog 4y agoAccording to the Google translated beginning of the article: "When elementary school students return from vacation, they can no longer use their portable Chromebooks. The Data Protection Authority has banned the use of Workspace - the applications on the Chromebook - because students' data may be disclosed to US authorities. "The specific decision applies to Helsingør Municipality. But the Danish Data Protection Agency makes it clear that all the other municipalities that use Google's learning platform - that is about half of the country's 98 municipalities - should stop using Chromebooks in teaching. "The Danish Data Protection Agency expects these municipalities to take relevant steps on the basis of the decision," writes the Danish Data Protection Agency.
- munk-a 4y agoSo basically completely sane concerns about user privacy? In an ideal world we'd limit our concerns about advertising and data sharing to the application layer, but in this modern world we need to be concerned about OS and even firmware level decisions about dialing home.
- contravariant 4y agoCould someone more knowledgeable about Chromebooks explain why banning the use of a single application is equivalent to banning Chromebooks? I thought it was a basic tablet with a webbrowser, is this wrong?
- buglunch 4y agoIt's mostly schrems 2, not the application as such. As soon as EU and US gets schrems sorted, it's back to business af usual.
- johndhi 4y agoMay never get sorted.
- jeffbee 4y agoChromeOS is a full-blown Linux implementation that happens to come with the Chrome browser but obviously also comes with the whole rest of the operating system (file browser, editors, i/o services, Debian and Android subsystems, ...)
- toast0 4y agoBanning Workspace isn't super clear. But Google Workspace is what they used to call G Suite and Google Apps and maybe one more name. That includes the sign on to the computer and the device management to enforce limitations, it includes Google Docs, it includes Google Drive which is where persistent data is typically stored for a Chromebook. If you elect not to use Workspace, there's no way to control and monitor the use of the devices. If the users login to the devices, they'd need to use a Google account, which presents the same data storage issues, so everyone would need to use the devices as a guest; but I'd bet guest use also results in unrestricted telemetry being sent to Google; and again, there's no way for the school system to manage the devices (which could enforce telemetry settings, perhaps) with users logged in as guests. On the other hand, a windows Active Directory based system might run with servers hosted by Microsoft in Azure (and probably subject to similar concerns about data access by US governments), or it can be done with servers hosted onsite by the school system, or it can be outsourced to a provider within the country or economic area. Apple computers are frankly unsuitable for this market; device management is poor. Open source operating systems could be setup however you like. Someone could setup a ChromeOS fork where the server hooks didn't need to go to Google, but I haven't seen it if it's been done. ChromeOS devices can usually run other OSes (if the other OSes support the critical hardware and the device can be convinced to boot in a method condusive to the other OS), but it might be labor intensive to setup at a school system wide level. You'd also need to come up with a different choice for productivity apllications as I don't think Google Docs would be easy to get working without Google.
- hedgehog 4y agoI think the eventual right answer is to make it possible to do device management and sign-in in a federated way instead of piling all eggs into so few baskets. Right now normal Mac and Windows installs have similar problems in that it's getting hard to use them without ceding control to Apple or Microsoft.
- Gwypaas 4y agoBecause American authorities can through the Cloud Act reach the data which violates GDPR.
- Ansil849 4y agoBecause of data disclosure concerns, in that students' data may be disclosed to US interests.
- staticassertion 4y agoEven with Google Translate I can't read it because it's paywalled. But the first paragraph reads something like: "The Data Protection Authority has banned the use of Workspace - the applications on the Chromebook - because students' data may be disclosed to US authorities" Wouldn't that be the case with all US hosted services?
- delusional 4y agoYes, and thats what makes the decision very notable. The article touches on the implications, but Politiken is not a technical news media so nothing in depth.
- luplex 4y agoas far as I understand, the US government does not protect the rights of EU citizens, so US-hosted services are not GDPR compliant. There was a special agreement to keep them legal, "privacy shield", which was taken down by EU Courts because of US government overreach. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EU%E2%80%93US_Privacy_Shield#Legal_challenge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EU%E2%80%93US_Privacy_Shield#L...
- delusional 4y agoA school district asked the danish government if they could still use google "workspace" for their teaching. The answer was no, and all other school districts were cautioned to also follow the new guidance. The "no" is said to be based on the possibility that google workspace data COULD be handed over to american authorities jy google.
- buglunch 4y agoThis is a great blogpost from simpleanalytics https://blog.simpleanalytics.com/denmark-bans-google-workspace-for-municipalities https://blog.simpleanalytics.com/denmark-bans-google-workspa...