Trial

Since 19th August, 'Google Apps for Education' is being piloted on a selected group of OU students, who were encouraged to move away from the current email system, 'FirstClass'. 'FirstClass' is expected to be phased out by May 2011. To date, only 2,000 students out of the 12,000 invited have signed up to the new service. As 'FirstClass' is phased out, other students, tutors and staff will follow "as appropriate" from January 2011. Once signed up, a link to Google Apps will be placed on students' and staff's OU account home pages.

The new email service is hosted at mail.google.com and is basically a Google (Gmail) account with an OU address (user.name@my.open.ac.uk). The interface is identical to that of Gmail, save for a tiny Open University logo at the top-left corner. In fact, when signing up to the new service, subscribers are offered the option to "elect to change this e-mail address to your new Gmail address or continue with your current [OU] e-mail address."

The university's Learning Innovation department claims that the arguments for hosting your own email are becoming "increasingly weak when it can be done externally for free, or at least much more cheaply." Outsourcing email services for its 230,000 students and staff will, thus, take away the "maintenance burden," while providing larger storage abilities offered by big commercial providers like Google.

A number of OU students and lecturers have told Corporate Watch that there has been "a great deal of resentment" among staff towards the increasingly commercial and business-oriented decisions by management. Paradoxically, many seem to be "happy" with the "better and faster" service provided by Google. This 'happiness', however, often seemed to be accompanied by an ignorance of the controversies surrounding Google's privacy policy, data protection and monopoly power.

The deal follows months of negotiations with Microsoft and Google about 'cloud computing' services. As the two software companies compete aggressively in the emerging market, IT professionals are still "not very confident" about the security and safety of data shared through cloud computing, whereby shared resources, software and information are provided to computers and other devices on demand over the Internet.

Apps

Google Apps is a customisable, self-contained piece of software provided and hosted by Google and managed by clients, which include businesses, government bodies and education establishments. The application set, which first appeared in 2006, includes several Google products under a custom domain name (such as open.ac.uk). With a similar functionality to traditional office suites, they include Google Mail (or Gmail), along with the usual Gmail contacts and calendar and chat facilities (Google Calendar and Google Talk); Google Documents, which provides storage and sharing for any type of document; and Google Sites, which enables the use of templates to create and share simple websites. In October 2009, Google allowed educational institutions to sign-up for a version of the service, titled Google Apps For Education, which combines features from the Standard and Premier editions of Google Apps.

The first large-scale deployment of Google Apps for Education was in early 2008 at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada, where 38,000 students and staff were given Gmail and in-browser IM capabilities. Other universities that use the service in the US include Arizona State University, University of Minnesota and George Washington University. In the UK, customers include University of Westminster, Leeds Metropolitan University and the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). A list of universities and other educational institutions that use Google Apps can be found here. Over three million businesses, big and small, have also adopted Google Apps. A list of business customers can be found here.

In its promotional literature, Google gives 10 reasons, or incentives, for why educational institutions should switch to Google Apps. These include "freeing up your IT" and "saving money." In Google's words, "Outsourcing the maintenance of servers to Google frees up resources that would have been spent on additional licenses and upgrades." Other incentives relate to what is known in economics jargon as the 'network externality effect', or the fact that the more people use a product, the higher its value. Hence, statements like "You're not alone", "Collaborate globally" and "Students will love you for it" are sold as benefits of switching to Google Apps. Other claims such as "powerful security" and "privacy protection" are far more controversial.

Privacy issues

Students and staff data are hosted by Google and managed by the OU under European Data Protection and US Safe Harbor legislation. There are significant differences, however, between commercial companies' and educational establishments' approaches to privacy and copyright issues.

When signing up to the new "Open University Google account" on the OU website, the Terms and Conditions link takes you to Google's Terms of Service instead of those of the OU. These include such controversial terms as:

* "Google reserves the right, but shall have no obligation, to pre-screen, flag, filter, refuse, modify or move any Content available via Google services. You understand that by using Google services you may be exposed to Content that is offensive, indecent or objectionable, and that you use Google services at your own risk."

* "By using Google services, you acknowledge and agree that Google may access, preserve, and disclose your account information and any Content associated with that account if required to do so by law or in a good faith belief that such access preservation or disclosure is reasonably necessary..."

* "By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through Google services which are intended to be available to the members of the public, you grant Google a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to reproduce, adapt, modify, publish and distribute such Content on Google services for the purpose of displaying, distributing and promoting Google services. Google reserves the right to syndicate Content submitted, posted or displayed by you on or through Google services and use that Content in connection with any service offered by Google. Google furthermore reserves the right to refuse to accept, post, display or transmit any Content in its sole discretion."

* "Some Google services are supported by advertising revenue and may display advertisements and promotions on the service. Such advertisements may be targeted to the content of information stored on the Google services, queries made through Google services or other information. The manner, mode and extent of advertising by Google on its services are subject to change. As consideration for your use of Google services, you agree that Google may place such advertising and that Google shall not be responsible or liable for any loss or damage of any sort incurred by you as a result of the presence of such advertisers on Google services or your subsequent dealings with advertisers."

This is in sharp contrast to the (old) OU privacy policy, which states that:

"We may use the personal information that you provide when you enquire or register... We do not release this information to third parties."

Google has been at the centre of a number of controversies around privacy issues in recent years. Earlier this month, the UK Information Commissioner ruled that the company had committed a "significant breach" of the Data Protection Act when its Street View cars collected personal data, including full emails and passwords, from unsuspecting Internet users. Google is also facing investigations in a number of countries around the world for similar breaches. Personal information, such as contact details, and browsing and online shopping habits are collected by companies and sold to others for the purpose of 'targeted advertising'.

More recently, Google announced that GMail contacts will no longer be "automatically handed over" to other websites and services, such as Facebook, but that user information will only shared if the site wanting access provided "reciprocal data feeds" to others. Google allows others to access the data it holds on its users through what is known as Application Programming Interface (API). "We provide feeds, APIs, and client tools to help you to move data in (or out) of [Google] Apps," the company states on its website. Sites such as Facebook use Google's API to let their users automatically import GMail contacts in order to fill out their profile and find others that use the service. Now Google will only give automatic access to GMail contacts to sites and services that let others "mine the data they hold." Industry analysts say Google's decision may be related to the deal struck recently between Facebook and Microsoft, which will allow user data to power Microsoft's Bing search engine (formerly known as Live Search, Windows Live Search and MSN Search).