1. Google in in a contract with the university that sets out exactly what Google can and can not do with the data. If they break that contract
no one will probably ever know, unless they do it in some very blatant way.
Also, "they" might not be Google as a corporate policy. It might be individual employees. It might be the future owner of Google assets if a few stupid decisions bankrupt it or cause it to break up. There are lots of reasons to be skeptical of promises of privacy, and this is a different sort of deal than changing chemical or paper suppliers. This is handing over, if I'm a student, faculty member, or administrator, my personal and school-related data, a lot of which is private, to an outside concern. That's a fundamentally different sort of thing to outsource than just a vendor of some supplies, and there are good reasons to be cautious about it.
1) Email and file services, for a research university with a computer science program, is a core function.
2) Data and communications storage, retention, and management, for a research university doing anything at all, is a core function.
3) The assumption that outsourcing non-core functionality is always and automatically the answer to inefficiency is a mistaken premise. There is nothing inherent in outside providers that makes them capable of greater efficiency. Especially when you house an entire department researching the best solutions to problems related to the concern at hand.
First, no, it is not completely irrelevant at all, because, for one thing, people assume a lot of things about people based on their parties, things which are not necessarily so. Plenty of people's party loyalties were developed before their parties flipped all over the place on their stances. As the post I was replying to astutely pointed out, the modern parties in the U.S. are better described as shifting coalitions than as consistent interest groups. I think it is extremely relevant to the current political landscape that people realize how inconsistent and short-lived the meanings of "Republican" and "Democrat" are, because one of the huge problems right now in the United States is blind party loyalty, along with unwillingness to hear or believe anything good about people who wear the other party's badge.
Second, "liberal" has its own problems with shifting meaning, but I do regularly remind people that the Republicans, even more recently, when their hero Ronald Reagan was President, believed that torture was something done by evil, communist regimes like the USSR, and that their beloved America was, back then, in their eyes heroic because it wasn't like those awful countries on the other side of the iron curtain with their secret prisons and indefinite detention of tortured prisoners. (And that they were right back then, and shouldn't have changed their mind about keeping the moral high ground just because an infinitely weaker enemy than the Soviet Union ever was has now taken center stage.)
I think our current chaotic information pool will improve in quality as honest brokers of info bundling and verification services emerge and thus develop a reputation.
I have been hoping for this outcome, but there is a lot of reason to believe it is unlikely. One reason is that, when it comes to mass social media-developed stories, the brokers are everyone, and honest news sources can be overwhelmed and lost in the noise. To prevent this, every person has to regard him- or herself as a journalist with an obligation to check things before posting them, tweeting them, or otherwise passing them along. Given how well this has worked with all of the incredibly unbelievable urban legends that continue to be propagated via email despite easy fact checking, I have a feeling a lot more people find it easier to click "share" than to take time to look something up carefully.
The other reason I worry about this is that reputations themselves hold value and therefore are regularly sold off just like any other assets. How many companies are there that have developed a reputation for high quality, over many years, and then someone realized that if they put the same brand name on a lesser product, they could sell more of it at lesser cost. Sure, it diminishes the brand, but that takes time, and the profits are immediate. Furthermore, our culture (at least in the U.S.) has gradually devalued actual honesty (the foundation of a reputation) in favor of branding (the imagery of a reputation). Most troubling, personal honesty itself is not considered important. What is a paid endorsement, really? It is putting up your reputation for sale. Yet this is accepted without question as the best way to cash in on one's status as a trusted person. To see this in action out in the masses, how many bloggers, after building up a following, begin accepting "sponsored posts"? Vast numbers of them, and many have probably never even realized there is a moral dimension to this at all, it's just a way to earn money. If they have thought about it, they probably have never taken it seriously enough to actually refuse to do it, because looking at it as a form of dishonesty would be a "fringe" view in our present culture, and therefore easily dismissed regardless of its accuracy. So what I worry about is that, unless we somehow foster an actual cultural change, we'll wind up with just a continued bombardment of unchecked "facts" mixed with an endless succession of people and institutions that build up a trusted reputation and then cash out.
Force needed to accelerate 2.2lbs of cookies = 1 Fig-newton to 1 meter per second