Fearing a breach of the privacy of students and teachers, the German state of Hesse has ruled that the use of Microsoft Office 365 in schools is illegal. Student and teacher information could be “exposed” to US spies, the state’s data protection commissioner has said
According to the commissioner's statements, "the use of the popular cloud platform poses risks due to the possibility of US officials accessing private and personal information of users.".
This may sound like yet another case of European states expressing concerns about user privacy and data protection, within the context of the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) , or a case of expressing concerns about the US government's foreign policy.
But in reality the decision by the Hesse Office for Data Protection and Freedom of Information is the result of years of domestic debate about whether Microsoft software should be banned entirely from German schools and other state institutions.
As the state claims, in addition to the information that German users provide when using the platform, Microsoft Office 365 also transmits telemetry data to the US.
Last year, Dutch researchers discovered that this data could include anything from common diagnostic information sent by software to content from internal applications, such as text suggestions from documents and data from users' emails. All of this, of course, violates the EU's data protection.
Following the developments, Germany's Federal Office for Information Security also expressed its concerns about the telemetry data sent by the Windows operating system.
The data protection commissioner of Hesse suggested using similar products/applications with on-premises licenses, and everyone is now waiting for Microsoft's official response on the matter.
