France says non to Office 365 and Google Workspace in school

#68 · 🔥 322 · 💬 114 · one year ago · www.theregister.com · Liriel · 📷
The French minister of national education and youth has said that free versions of Microsoft Office 365 and Google Workspace should not be used in schools - a position that reflects ongoing European concerns about cloud data sovereignty, competition, and privacy rules. Paid versions of these cloud services might be an option if they hadn't already been disallowed based on worries about data safety. French authorities consider Microsoft and Google cloud services that store data in the US to be non-compliant with European data regulations like GDPR and with "Schrems II" - a 2020 ruling [PDF] from the Court of Justice of the European Union governing data sharing across borders. On September 15, 2021, Nadi Bou Hanna, director of DINUM, France's interministerial digital department, said in a letter that French government agencies considering cloud services to replace office and messaging products on government servers like Exchange should not use Office 365 [PDF] because it does not comply with France's "Cloud at the Center" initiative. Citing the position of DINUM, the prime minister's "Cloud at the Center" policy, and a May 2021 note from the National Commission for Computing and Liberties advising higher education institutions to use GDPR-respecting cloud collaboration services, the Ministry of Education in October 2021 said it advised academies to avoid any deployment of Office 365 or Google Workspace. German data protection authorities came to a similar conclusion in 2019 when they disallowed Microsoft Office 365 in classrooms in the state of Hessen. Google last year undertook a similar initiative to meet EU data protection demands.
France says non to Office 365 and Google Workspace in school



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