< Education during Covid

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~nargran

> I wish universities would just host their own Jitsi servers

Yes, or other similar libre option. I wrote some mails to people at my uni in charge of that (to question, for example, whether our Teams accounts are legal under GDPR or not, because the university made them for us without our consent (!!!)). They told me not to worry about privacy because "Teams" (that is, Microsoft) "follows the regulations". That's basically saying nothing and doesn't address my concerns.

I also pointed out that there are some students in our university from countries in bad relationship with the US that could even be in danger if forced to use a product by a company with close ties to the US three letter agencies. For example, according to the numbers the university publishes, there are several dozens of students from Iran and even three from North Korea.

Something funny and sad at the same time is that while the department of education of th regional government has their own jitsi for primary and secondary education, and schools are forbidden from using different, private services, their servers were overwhelmed at the beginning of the pandemic and teachers were angrily protesting not being able to use Teams, Zoom or Hangouts instead and saying that the regional government "feared private competition to their product" (which isn't even a product).

Okay, /rant for now

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~pseudoriemann wrote:

It's sad how badly people react to very sensible data protection measures. I hope the Jitsi servers could be upgraded to handle the traffic.

Meanwhile my country decided it was a good idea to force Teams upon all students from primary to high school. I really don't know what I would have done had I still been in school, but I feel like temporarily dropping out would have been on the table.

Well, many of my professors opted for Zoom (we also all got accounts assigned automatically, I agree that that is very questionable under GDPR) and it might be just as bad as Teams. But at least Zoom accounts aren't also linked to a thousand other services so I somehow managed to swallow that pill.

I will never understand how nonchalantly private information gets outsourced to the US without anyone questioning it. But complaining about it too much is bad for my health so I will also stop this rant again :)