Microsoft Office 365: Now Illegal In Many Schools in Germany (zdnet.com) 137
"Schools in the central German state of Hesse [population: 6 million] have been told it's now illegal to use Microsoft Office 365," reports ZDNet:
The state's data-protection commissioner has ruled that using the popular cloud platform's standard configuration exposes personal information about students and teachers "to possible access by US officials".
That might sound like just another instance of European concerns about data privacy or worries about the current US administration's foreign policy. But in fact the ruling by the Hesse Office for Data Protection and Information Freedom is the result of several years of domestic debate about whether German schools and other state institutions should be using Microsoft software at all.
Besides the details that German users provide when they're working with the platform, Microsoft Office 365 also transmits telemetry data back to the US. Last year, investigators in the Netherlands discovered that that data could include anything from standard software diagnostics to user content from inside applications, such as sentences from documents and email subject lines. All of which contravenes the EU's General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, the Dutch said...
To allay privacy fears in Germany, Microsoft invested millions in a German cloud service, and in 2017 Hesse authorities said local schools could use Office 365. If German data remained in the country, that was fine, Hesse's data privacy commissioner, Michael Ronellenfitsch, said. But in August 2018 Microsoft decided to shut down the German service. So once again, data from local Office 365 users would be data transmitted over the Atlantic. Several US laws, including 2018's CLOUD Act and 2015's USA Freedom Act, give the US government more rights to ask for data from tech companies.
ZDNet also quotes Austrian digital-rights advocate Max Schrems, who summarizes the dilemma. "If data is sent to Microsoft in the US, it is subject to US mass-surveillance laws. This is illegal under EU law."
That might sound like just another instance of European concerns about data privacy or worries about the current US administration's foreign policy. But in fact the ruling by the Hesse Office for Data Protection and Information Freedom is the result of several years of domestic debate about whether German schools and other state institutions should be using Microsoft software at all.
Besides the details that German users provide when they're working with the platform, Microsoft Office 365 also transmits telemetry data back to the US. Last year, investigators in the Netherlands discovered that that data could include anything from standard software diagnostics to user content from inside applications, such as sentences from documents and email subject lines. All of which contravenes the EU's General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, the Dutch said...
To allay privacy fears in Germany, Microsoft invested millions in a German cloud service, and in 2017 Hesse authorities said local schools could use Office 365. If German data remained in the country, that was fine, Hesse's data privacy commissioner, Michael Ronellenfitsch, said. But in August 2018 Microsoft decided to shut down the German service. So once again, data from local Office 365 users would be data transmitted over the Atlantic. Several US laws, including 2018's CLOUD Act and 2015's USA Freedom Act, give the US government more rights to ask for data from tech companies.
ZDNet also quotes Austrian digital-rights advocate Max Schrems, who summarizes the dilemma. "If data is sent to Microsoft in the US, it is subject to US mass-surveillance laws. This is illegal under EU law."
Unfortunate (Score:1)
Instead of investing in multiple cloud services, I think we should back a single provider. This consolidation would allow all governments to snoop on their citizens at a reduced cost to the taxpayer. Win win!
USA! USA! (Score:4, Insightful)
I wish my government cared as much about my privacy as other countries.
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You can thank Obama. Started with a tiny surveillance program and expanded its scope to epic levels. That is the mass surveillance they are talking about, including spying on the german chancellor.
The domestic arm violates our Constitution. Forget that Congress authorized it in an act that supposedly limited it, Congress doesn't have the authority to authorize mass government surveillance.
Re: USA! USA! (Score:1)
This started under Bush, not Obama.
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"Started with a tiny surveillance program"
Which was
"started under Bush"
"and expanded its scope to epic levels."
All Obama.
There were a couple programs in place of small scale and fudging the rules. Obama scaled them up from Cat 1 to Cat 6. Did you even read what Snowden disclosed and watch his interviews? Even the movie?
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""Started with a tiny surveillance program"
Which was
"started under Bush"
"and expanded its scope to epic levels."
All Obama.
There were a couple programs in place of small scale and fudging the rules. Obama scaled them up from Cat 1 to Cat 6. Did you even read what Snowden disclosed and watch his interviews? Even the movie?"
Inconvenient truths are not trolls.
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It's a bit naive to think that surveillance started with Obama. It's certainly gotten more extensive with the rise of cheap digital equipment but I would say for sure they were dreaming of this sort of thing around the cold war and planning on how to make it happen. If not the cold war then sooner.
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"It's a bit naive to think that surveillance started with Obama."
I didn't say it started with Obama. I explicitly said he started with a tiny program, therefore that program came before him. But those programs were started under Bush and well after the "rise of cheap digital equipment." Obama took what were small grey programs and expanded them mass and epic scale both domestically and internationally. Did you actually read the disclosures from Snowden and his interviews? Did you at least watch the movie?
Yo
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'"It's a bit naive to think that surveillance started with Obama."
I didn't say it started with Obama. I explicitly said he started with a tiny program, therefore that program came before him. But those programs were started under Bush and well after the "rise of cheap digital equipment." Obama took what were small grey programs and expanded them mass and epic scale both domestically and internationally. Did you actually read the disclosures from Snowden and his interviews? Did you at least watch the movie?
Y
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Then your original statement was ambiguous.
"Started with a tiny surveillance program and expanded its scope to epic levels."
You could easily take that to mean he STARTED the program himself or that the program was already there when he took office. I read it as the former.
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"You can thank Obama. Started with a tiny surveillance program and expanded its scope to epic levels. That is the mass surveillance they are talking about, including spying on the german chancellor.
The domestic arm violates our Constitution. Forget that Congress authorized it in an act that supposedly limited it, Congress doesn't have the authority to authorize mass government surveillance."
Inconvenient truths are not trolls.
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Hell yes to that so I can dump toxic waste over your fence,
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Huh? (Score:5, Funny)
The state's data-protection commissioner has ruled that using the popular cloud platform's standard configuration exposes personal information about students and teachers "to possible access by US officials".
What a ridiculous thing to say! The current US govt. would never stoop so low as to collect personal data about people and wilfully abuse it. They ran on a platform of draining the swamp and cracking down on corruption and abuses of power. They are most honest, uncorrupt and honourable bunch of selfless reformers you'll ever meet, especially president Trump.
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HURR DURR DRUMPF
Of course you conveniently forget the Obama Administration actually got caught spying on German government officials.
Wrong + Wrong != Right. I don't really care what Obama did, he was a disappointment but that is history now just like both the Bushes and Clinton are history now. Trump is the president in power, Trump is the one who promised these things and Trump is the one who's not delivering.
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The point is when bad things were happening under Obama, apologists like you blamed Bush and lag effects. Now that the same is happening under Trump, your tune has changed.
You are no better than your antisemite forefathers. All that has changed is the groups you find appropriate to be bigoted against.
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The point is when bad things were happening under Obama, apologists like you blamed Bush and lag effects. Now that the same is happening under Trump, your tune has changed.
You are no better than your antisemite forefathers. All that has changed is the groups you find appropriate to be bigoted against.
No, the point is that obsessing over the past not going to change anything since neither one of us owns a time machine. Trump is in the in the White House right now. He could change tons of things he promised to change if he wanted to, some of whom he'd actually get democratic support on (like infrastructure), but he hasn't changed anything and he doesn't seem to want to. All he has done is drain the swamp into his administration and basically fail to deliver on all of his big promises. Even his own party w
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Re:Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Even if you believe that you are forgetting the most important rule when figuring out if a law is good or bad. You don't ask what YOUR preferred political party will do with the law - you ask what the OPPOSITION will do with it once they're the ruling party.
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Even if you believe that you are forgetting the most important rule when figuring out if a law is good or bad. You don't ask what YOUR preferred political party will do with the law - you ask what the OPPOSITION will do with it once they're the ruling party.
It seems to me that is something Mitch McConnell does not spend much time thinking about.
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Re:GDPR? (Score:5, Informative)
I thought the GDPR required all login/data to be stored locally?
No, tldr it requires that if you collect information on EU citizens that it be stored in such a way that personal identifying information isn't stored in a way where it would be obtainable by unauthorized users. There also needs to be a way for EU users to opt-out of any and all data collection beyond the absolute minimum for the software/site to function, and to be able to request copies of all data a company has on them, along with the ability to permanently destroy it (within reason, a policy for when backups with the data expires is permitted).
This would apply to US companies collecting EU citizen information, even if that information is stored in the US. The US laws for providing this info to the government when requested runs counter to that, thus a reason for the ban.
Easy: Switch to gmail and google drive (Score:3)
Re:Easy: Switch to gmail and google drive (Score:5, Informative)
Nope. Note in TFS the key phrase: 'In its default configuration'. The university that I used to work for bought Office 365. This was even before the GDPR, but the university deals with a lot of confidential commercial data from industrial partners and with health records in life sciences departments. Google's stock T&Cs were completely incompatible with this and they refused to negotiate. Microsoft's stock T&Cs were also incompatible (which is why this ruling is completely unsurprising), but Microsoft was happy to negotiate a contract that gave much stricter controls over data.
For Germany in particular, the German Azure data centres are actually owned by a joint venture between Deutsche Telekom and Microsoft and so out of US jurisdiction. Companies in Germany (and the rest of the EU) can buy an Office 365 subscription that guarantees that their data doesn't ever leave Germany [microsoft.com].
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That move to drop locale storage which the US government has been strong arm pushing in the most obvious blatant and corrupt way, to promote US control of other countries social media contacts. I will kill US tech companies overseas, only corrupt countries allowing it. Trump made it oh so much worse by trying to strong arm every country into storing it's citizens data in the US, with threats of economic attacks and all, like what the fuck, stupid as. Trump cost US tech firms TRILLIONS over the long term.
Direct harm (Score:5, Insightful)
What about the fact that using Microsoft Office 365 exposes students to, you know, Microsoft Office 365? That makes people dumber, which is not the goal of a school.
Word-for-word fake MS talking point. (Score:1)
I still remember the web site MS had made, to spread this *precise* fake talking point you parroted here.
How have you still not realized that that is circular reasoning?
Do you never think about what you were made to say?
Office 365 harms everyone by spying on them, and due to pointlessly costing money, despite Office software being 100% "done" since the 90s. Monocultures harm everyone due to creating single points of failure. Closed source software harms everyone due to stealing the ability to solve problems
Re:Direct harm (Score:5, Insightful)
I would say that students could get by with LibreOffice Writer, but for spreadsheets, nothing compares to MS Excel. It really is a much better tool, and there isn't really a serious competitor, especially once you get into highschool and start using some of the higher level functionality.
Excel is not "much better". (Score:1)
You're just more used to it. It's a bias.
In fact, Excel is just a functional programming language with vector and statistics/mathematics functions a 2D vector editor widget, and a standard business graph drawing library.
I can literally wrap up a better tool than Excel in a day, using Haskell, its extensive library collection, any widget toolkit and a good graph drawing library.
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I use both. I'm familiar with both. There's no question about it, Excel is better. I'm a very long time Unix guy. There were better tools out there. Frame for Unix, Officepower for Unix. Microsoft poured the money into it to make it great.
It would be wonderful if Microsoft had their office suite available for Linux. Get rid of the turd of an operating system called Windows.
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If you are doing really fancy stuff, maybe, but most don't. LibreOffice Calc does have some rough-spots with regard to formatting, though. But probably fixable.
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98% of office workers have no fucking idea what you are talking about
A much better tool (Score:3)
Excel is and always was an amateurish attempt at spreadsheet software, as anyone will immediately concede who ever had the luck of having been allowed to work with a nineteen-eighties MS-DOS office-suite software by the name of Framework, which offered one structured programming language that was used both as a macro language for everything within the application and as a formula language for spreadsheets. Each spreadsheet cell could contain a complete program "behind" the cell, written in a full-blown edit
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The modern, with ribbons, Excel is basically completely unusable. No idea why you think otherwise ...
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So go back to 2003 or whatever grandpa - I admit that I hated the ribbon menu at first, but once you get used to it going back to the older version is what sucks.
I've used MS Office and at home Libre office and Google shits and none of them compare to Excel. If you are just doing basic crap then they are all basically the same, but when you want to do more complicated stuffs nothing comes even close to Excel.
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I have to agree with that. I know it's popular on /. to bash MS, but excel is an amazing bit of programing.
I use it for so many things in my daily work. I even wrote a macro to automatically sync huge file sets for a client to FTP. You can do more or less anything with excel. You can tie is loads of other programs as well.
Plus, it's easy and fun to use.
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Actually, MATLAB, R, Wolfram Alpha...
Excel dumbs the brain, and I write that as someone who has written extensive and complex Excel sheets when I had no other choice. But the whole thing is so fragile and opaque, it is my honest belief that anyone using it for anything even remotely critical, like a business process, should be fired and jailed for gross negligence.
I dimly remember there was a study done that concluded with something like 70% of the spreadsheets investigated having logic errors affecting the
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His "products" were still used company wide, occasionally he got a change request for something he made >10 years ago and had forgotten. It had been working fine all those years.
The fact that they need to call the original programmer in to change something should ring alarm bells.
Problem with Matlab/R etc, is that almost nobody had that installed and could use it. While every office monkey had MS Office installed, was at least somewhat familiar with it or could ask coworkers for help.
Yes. If all you have is a hammer...
Excel is that hammer, same as Word, this utterly terrible piece of crap that is neither a good word processor nor a good DTP program nor a good authoring software - but it's a bit of all and readily available. But if you've ever seen how much clearer a document looks if you do nothing to it except copy it from word to InDesign or some other actual DTP software, you realiz
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The user doesn't know how to make changes, so he calls the local Excel wizard, which was my dad.
I wasn't aware they didn't have other programmers.
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Maybe it's just personal preference, but I find LibreOffice Calc much easier to use for basic analysis than Excel. This is mostly due to how easy it is to import data into it from external sources. Just select the output and middle click to put it where you want. If it look like CSV or some other delimited format, Calc opens a dialog to make sure it is brought in correctly. Every time I've tried to do this with Excel, it hasn't worked very well. Generally you have to save your results to a CSV file, lo
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That makes people dumber, which is not the goal of a school.
Are you sure about that? Quite a few of the things I see seem to indicate that one of the goals of school is to keep people educated but unable to think.
There's reasons people moved away from mainframes. (Score:5, Informative)
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actually in the case of IBM they were and are mostly rented and remote access by IBM is condition
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Not really. Mainframes were too expensive for all but the largest of companies - both in hardware cost and in the highly specialized staff to run them and facilities to house them. Time-sharing was common, and even companies which had their own mainframe were effectively renting because of the need for manufacturer-provided service coverage.
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With mainframes, you could at least say with confidence in which country your data was stored.
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At least with a mainframe, a company could own it, and if they properly cared for it, it would never break.
Which were? (Score:3)
And no, the "cloud" isn't "mainframe mentality", whatever that's supposed to mean. There was a time when companies and government agencies, given they were large enough, had their own mainframes which didn't even have a physical connection to the outside, so they had complete informational self-determination. Quite the opposite of "going into the cloud", I'd say.
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The "cloud" is essentially a return to mainframe mentality.
Depends on what you do with the cloud. In the case of Office 365 they aren't providing CPU cycles to thin clients like mainframes did.
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It is. But the ElCheapo variant with limited reliability and security.
Window 10 (Score:3, Interesting)
So how come the Germans haven't banned the installations of Window 10 in schools and other public institutions? It sends a ton of telemetry information back to Microsoft's US servers doesn't it? Why allow that exception and not Office 365? It's not as if US officials can just access any of the data stored in the Microsoft's cloud without due process.
Re:Window 10 (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Window 10 (Score:5, Informative)
A few people have produced anti-sharing scripts for Windows 10, including myself. You can, but it's not easy - the OS fights back. .jpg files - every time I opened one, I saw a brief connection to MS's servers. I thought it was something really sinister at first, spying on user images, but then discovered it happens every time a UWP app is opened, including the image previewer. At a guess, it's collecting usage information.
- The Windows firewall has a hard-coded exemption for system services, including all the telemetry. You can block it, but it doesn't have any effect.
- Several telemetry services cannot be disabled without register editing or powershell commands - and those tend to be re-enabled by Windows updates.
- A number of burried settings which used to work no longer do, having been disabled in updates.
- Triggers for telemetry-sending are burried all over the system. I found one just by opening
- You can't even open the start menu without triggering a bunch of connections to MS servers. Even after disabling web search from start menu.
- The telemetry servers - actually all MS services, including licensing, updates, etc - ignore the host file. They always resolve through DNS.
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According to the ruling linked above, Microsoft has refused to tell the German government what the content of the telemetry data is, so you don't what data Windows 10 is transmitting back to Microsoft. So, the data collection happens without the consent of the user, contains information not known to the user because Microsoft won't divulge its contents, and there no easily accessible way to stop it. I can't think how this would not violate the GDPR, yet the German government allows 10 to be installed in pub
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It doesn't matter whether there are ways to mitigate Window 10 telemetry (plus there is no proof that German institutions are employing those methods), it still violates the GDPR.
In fact, according to the linked ruling above Microsoft has not yet clarified what the content of the telemetry is so
In addition, there is another issue that the Federal Office for Information Security has pointed out to the public in autumn 2018. With the use of the Windows 10 operating system, a wealth of telemetry data is transmitted to Microsoft, whose content has not been finally clarified despite repeated inquiries at Microsoft. Such data is also transmitted when using Office 365.
Yet, Windows 10 is still allowed to be installed despite knowing that it transmits a "wealth of telemetry data" that Microsoft has refused to explain the contents of.
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window 10 data collection violates the GDPR. Whether the data is recorded instantaneously via inputs to the cloud service, or whether it's sent in a batch via a scheduled task, it still violates user privacy, period. Yet, the German government allows Windows 10 to be installed in German public institutions.
captcha: retorts
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A school has special responsibilities to protect the pupils and students.
A company has no such obligations. (Yes, a company has to protect data of customers, but not necessarily its own data or data of employees)
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It's not as if US officials can just access any of the data stored in the Microsoft's cloud without due process.
Hahahahahahahaha!
Due process. Right. LOL.
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More like the Germans recognize what can go wrong when you contract with US computing companies and start running their personal data through tabulators. We haven't quite reached that point [slashdot.org] yet.
Finally, about time we speak of this in the open (Score:1)
and it's good that it's the EU's strongest economy and driving force that brings this up: American software and hardware is a dependency, a risk, and an opportunity for America for information collection for nefarious purposes.
The sooner the EU can make the switch away from AMD and Intel-manufactured CPUs, and Microsoft and Apple's operating systems, the better. The historical record of the past 20 years have clearly shown what provision America has to subvert its own hardware and software, regardless of wh
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I agree with this while simultaneous fearing the repercussions this could have on the world as a whole. India, Russia, and China will set up their own infrastructure too to avoid leaking sensitive data, they have already moved in that direction. The internet is also becoming more controlled with China as the leading example.
How will this change the positive aspects of internationalism with for instance trade and cultural exchange as effective moderators against war? How will it affect technological and scie
Oh no! (Score:1)
What a shame, the advantages of having a word processing system that is cloud based and subscription based rather than an old fashion one that you just buy and sits on your computer are vast. For example.... hmm.. well... let me get back to you on this...
Meanwhile Chromebooks in schools ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Meanwhile in many Canadian and US schools, students are given Chromebooks in high school. ...
That makes the kids subject to corporate data collection for many of their formative years
Fuck spyware (Score:2)
Seems a bit much (Score:1)
Why not just let people use it, but require fake names? Especially if theyâ(TM)re all using the same name, such as Hans N. Fritz. For usernames, just have the schools assign them, and use numbers.
Privacy saved.
Nice try (Score:2)
>"That might sound like just another instance of European concerns about data privacy or worries about the current US administration's foreign policy."
Nice try. The current administration is no more "data hungry" than past administrations (the last one included).
shooting yourself in the foot (Score:3)
But in August 2018 Microsoft decided to shut down the German service.
There was a solution, and they decided "nah, let's not do that".
MS never changed and never will.
Windows 365 sucks (Score:1)
They tried to shove that crap on us. The online version simply isn't up to the task.
Then there's outlook garbage.
Interesting Germany made it illegal. The Joke's on them though. When's the last time the US Government found something they were looking for? The Simpsons even had a joke about that years ago.