The Price of Free Cloud Resources

Grazed from THE Journal. Author: Margo Pierce.

All students, educators, and administrators are subject to data-gathering when they use cloud resources. Everyone’s online movements are followed by a number of service providers or advertisers, especially when the services they are using are "free," according to Jim Siegl, chair of the Consortium of School Networking (CoSN) Technical Committee, which researches and reports on internet privacy, along with other education technology issues.

Data is the most common (yet invisible) fee extracted from users by companies that make search engines, e-mail, and other cloud computing resources accessible to schools. Siegl reads the user agreements and terms and conditions of various cloud offerings such as Google Apps for Education or Microsoft 365 in order to understand the true cost of "free."…

"I think John Zittrain said it best," Siegel said, "’If what you are getting online is for free, you are not the customer, you are the product.’" He continued, "You have schools that are extremely conservative and white-list: You can only go to these [approved] resources. You have schools that only block things that are explicit: pornography, that sort of thing. Then you have some schools that are in-between, that block YouTube because it could be inappropriate." The type of cloud resource, the user agreement, and who actually "signs" the contact also impact the level of privacy. An administrator can turn off or control accessibility to different components of an application in a way that a private individual can’t…

Read more from the source @ http://thejournal.com/articles/2012/12/04/the-price-of-free-cloud-resources.aspx