GDPR rights are being ignored. In practice, this leads to a situation where Microsoft is trying to contractually dump most of its legal responsibilities under the GDPR on schools that provide Microsoft 365 Education services to their pupils or students.
Trying to find out exactly what privacy policies or documents apply to the use of Microsoft 365 Education is an expedition in itself. There is a serious lack of transparency, forcing users and schools to navigate a maze of privacy policies, documents, terms and contracts that all seem to apply. The information provided in these documents is always slightly different, but consistently vague about what actually happens to children’s data when they use Microsoft 365 Education services.
Maartje de Graaf, data protection lawyer at noyb: “Microsoft provides such vague information that even a qualified lawyer can’t fully understand how the company processes personal data in Microsoft 365 Education. It is almost impossible for children or their parents to uncover the extent of Microsoft’s data collection.”
Felix Mikolasch, data protection lawyer at noyb: “Our analysis of the data flows is very worrying. Microsoft 365 Education appears to track users regardless of their age. This practice is likely to affect hundreds of thousands of pupils and students in the EU and EEA. Authorities should finally step up and effectively enforce the rights of minors.”
As the terms and conditions and the privacy documentation of Microsoft 365 Education are uniform for the EU/EEA, all children living in these countries are exposed to the same violations of their GDPR rights. Therefore, noyb also suggests that the authority should impose a fine on Microsoft.
Schools should prepare children for work and the software they use should ideally reflect the software you would use at a job.
At best you learn some basic formatting and table calculations, there’s no need to get specific into MS word/excel. There’s essentially no difference between MS and Libre office here. Same with the operating system, if you’re just sitting in an office, reading and answering emails in a browser you don’t have to care about the OS.
Besides, school should teach critical thinking and how to transfer skills, not shoehorn pupils into specific roles and software.
Disagree. Computer literally does not mean to learn where exactly to click, but to learn how to navigate the computer and what does what mean. Every UI is different, every app behaves differently, and most of the time you won’t land on the same screen.
It is not about “turn the wheel left to go left” hard-coded truth. Sometimes you wanna go left, you have to turn right, accept ToS, and select a file to open.
The absolute opposite. Software changes all the time and even the same software won’t look the same in a few years. Children will live a decade or two before they start work. Decades of ever faster change and development. Only fundamentals and science stats same.
It would be important to learn with maximum variety so you see the patterns and principles of the task and find your own creative solutions to get the results you want. Just like at a job.