SWGfL and Google Apps

[morganw]

Live@edu is hosted in Dublin, with fail-over to Amsterdam.

Google do abide by and have a safe harbor agreement which is accepted by Becta and ICO. The fine of £500k would be from the ICO ... who don't have a problem with the Safe harbor agreement?

 

A council not accepting this as acceptable practice is very different to the ICO issuing a massive fine. I would advise whoever you spoke with at the council to contact the ICO to get clarification as other LAs have no issue with this.

 

Thanks, will look into this.

[K.C.Leblanc]

We should be teaching them what to do to avoid harmful content and what to do when they find it rather than trying make a pretend "safe" internet. With upwards of 90% of the net dedicated to pr0n and freaky stuff its always going to be easier to teach kids to avoid that to try to block every objectionable site.

 

I'm coming round to that view. When doing my weakly naughty trawl I came accross a record from a yr 7 student who'd searched for "Homosexuals Being Abused". It was obviouse that they just wanted pictures for PSHE, but my first though was would would happen if they attempted the search at home. I passed it up to the assistant head who got the student's HOY to phone home.

[mb2k01]

Anyone else just being informed by their LEA that they might be fined £500,000 if Google Apps data is found to be outside the EU?

 

Hi Morgan,

The email was typical late response as we've come to accept. What it said was that a 500k fine would be payable *if a school was prosecuted as result of data loss*

Through a mixture of concern / lack of understanding, the current guidelines for Government departments is that data is kept secure inside the UK (perhaps the EU too?). Obviously we know what the Google answer will be in response to their questions, which means the LA will more than likely rally Cornwall Heads to seek alternative provisions - either for all, or just for users involved with data transfer/export.

 

(You know where I am if/when you want to play with Exchange! )

[morganw]

We did inform the relevant person when we started using it (September 2008) and no one could give a answer as to whether using it was a good thing or not. I find it surprising that (as claimed in the email) they've only just realised people are using it.

 

Aren't emails the legal equivalent of a postcard though? I'm fairly sure this is the case, if it gets read in transit that is just the nature of how the system was designed. I've always told people not to email confidential data without some kind of encryption, and also been surprised when unencrypted confidential data has come in from outside agencies e.g. the police.

 

Thanks for the offer of a look at Exchange, might be forced to implement this.

[mb2k01]

The 2008 reference doesn't surprise me at all. Pretty much the standard response when something isn't known or understood - which was probably the case for them back then! (It might be useful if you still have that email though - might be good evidence further down the line if/when challenged?)

 

Generally I agree with the postcard analogy, but the real world scenario is that people do transmit unsuitable data like you said.

It's all one huge "cover your back" cycle. The Government had high profile data losses and had to show the public they implemented new measures to stop it happening. We're an extension of Government so we get dragged in to it too.

 

I'm currently writing a Data Protection Policy which touches on this, and quite frankly is a complete load of tosh as well!

[This rant is not protectively marked!]

[diggory]

Anybody else been taken by surprise as Google applications (Gmail, Picasa, Docs etc.) failed to work this morning? Found the article on the website explaining why they've done it (SSL searches on Google bypassing the filters) so appreciate why they've done it, but why do we only seem to find these things are happening afterwards, or is it just me?!

 

Yeah I got an email explaining the situation about an hour after getting into work. A memeber of our own staff had already emailed me about the lack of gmail...

[CyberNerd]

this is fixed now:

 

Official Google Enterprise Blog: An update on encrypted web search in schools

 

Less than two weeks ago, we announced here that we would be moving our encrypted search service to a new hostname in order to better serve our school partners and their users. Today, we moved encrypted search from https://www.google.com to https://encrypted.google.com. The site functions in the same way. However, if school network administrators decide to block encrypted searches on https://encrypted.google.com, the blocking will no longer affect Google authenticated services like Google Apps for Education.

 

We are continuing to explore longer-term options such that we could return encrypted search to https://www.google.com without introducing issues with school content filters.

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