And you aren't playing under the same cost/benefit equation? Is it worth the fairly likely cost of the lives of several fellow insurgents or innocent bystanders to disable a tank for a matter of hours, only to see it back in action the next day? This is how occupiers can be successful- the price paid by insurgents is usually much, much higher.
* No bullshit. Make sure you get an itemized bill for your next surgical procedure, it'll piss you off what they charge for some of this shit.
I know someone who had to have a late-night imaging done once in the ER, I forget if it was an MRI or a CT scan. The bill had extra charges for overtime for the technician who had to be called in after-hours, and- I'm not making this up- also had extra charges for what amounted to after-hours overtime for the machine itself. I wasn't aware the machines had unionized or otherwise negotiated for extra pay when called into service outside normal business hours. It was only through looking closely at the itemized bill that they noticed this, and managed to argue the charge away, as there really was no justification the hospital could give for it.
If there are no employees than there is no one to use the data. Another point is that, depending on the contract we have never seen, the data may have to be destroyed if ownership changes.
Sure there is: whoever walks off with the hard drives at the end of the day. Good luck tracking down who has physical control over everything and verifying somehow that all the data was securely wiped (much less actually getting a copy) when your only access is through a bankruptcy trustee or a few remaining or former employees who may have legal reasons to avoid saying much.
How ias an employee who is accountable to a university different from an employee who is accountable to Google who is accountable to the university?
That should be obvious. The longer the chain of accountability, and the greater the number of separate walled institutions serving as the links in that chain, the less real that accountability is. Have you really never encountered this phenomenon? It is universal, across the spectrum of services, from janitorial services to web hosting services. Do something in-house, and you can investigate, fire, and possibly legally hold your own employees accountable for their violations. Plus their sense of loyalty, assuming they have any, is toward you. Certainly their livelihood is in your hands. Pay an outside firm to do it, and you stand not only a good chance of being misled or lied to- with no real recourse or ability to find out otherwise- about whether a violation even occurred, you'll have one heck of a time getting complete information, making sure the right people are held to account, or changing things. You don't have control over sloppiness in procedures, you can't even see whether it is present. I would contend that in a significant number of cases, outsourcing doesn't save anything real at all, it just hides the fact that the savings are being made by cutting corners that an in-house operation isn't willing to cut. This has nothing to do with any kind of ridiculous "all corporations are bad" idea. It has to do with short-sightedness or sacrificing important things to try to save dollars without realizing the importance of those things.
It might be individual employees of the university run mail system. What makes Google employees any different than University employees?
Accountability to the university.
It might be the university attempting to make money by selling the information. Any future owner of Google, if theat ever happens, would still be bound by the contracts signed by Google.
Sure you can come up with scenarios that can cause issue. The point is that these scenarios apply to any entity that handles the university's email be it Google, the University or another provider.
No, they don't all apply in the same way. The university is probably long-lived in comparison to any of its technology vendors, and its interests do not coincide exactly with the interests of outside vendors. And a service provider bankruptcy, company split, spin-off, or acquisition is likely to be something of a free-for-all, with nobody ever even knowing where everything went or able to force any action of any sort. Just try going and enforcing the contract that says they need to archive your data, do so securely, and make it available to you when there are no employees left. When you outsource something, you aren't just giving up control in the financial operations sense. You're also giving up control in every other sense. This is the sort of decision people in business regularly plunge into without sufficient forethought. Who would I prefer handle it? The university itself. There is no inherent reason why an outside provider for something like email has to be cheaper in any significant way for a client the size of a major university. And I'm not making any assumption about incompetent IT professionals- I think you're making an assumption that it was IT professionals at all, rather than business administrators who have made this decision in most universities.
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.
It's a naive, domestic operating system without any breeding, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption.