In a potential blow to Google’s efforts to establish itself as a major player in enterprise software, a leading public university has ended its evaluation of Gmail as the official eMail program for its 30,000 faculty and staff members, InformationWeek reports—and it’s got some harsh words for the search giant. In a joint letter last week to employees, University of California-Davis CIO Peter Siegel, Academic Senate IT chair Niels Jensen, and Campus Council IT chair Joe Kiskis said the school decided to end its Gmail pilot, which could have led to campus-wide deployment, because faculty members doubted Google’s ability to keep their correspondences private. Many faculty “expressed concerns that our campus’s commitment to protecting the privacy of their communications is not demonstrated by Google and that the appropriate safeguards are neither in place at this time nor planned for in the near future,” the letter said. Google officials, for their part, insisted that their privacy controls are adequate. “Obviously there’s lots of opinions and voices on campuses,” said Jeff Keltner, a business development manager in the Google Apps for Education group. “By and large, it’s not typical of what we’re seeing in the market. We’re seeing lots of schools move their students and faculty onto Gmail,” said Keltner, who also noted that UC Davis students are continuing to use the service and that Gmail users’ privacy is protected by contractual assurances that govern data handling…
- Research: Social media has negative impact on academic performance - April 2, 2020
- Number 1: Social media has negative impact on academic performance - December 31, 2014
- 6 reasons campus networks must change - September 30, 2014