Comment Re:Obligatory. (Score 4, Interesting) 64
This. I work at a college and I see this every day. Every big edutech vendor are forcing their clients into SASS models. Ellucian is doing it for their Banner product, so soon their schools will have no choice but to put their entire ERP system in the cloud. It's a security and privacy nightmare. FERPA allows it as long as the outsourcee is doing the "same work" that an employee of the school would be doing. Increasingly these companies are being bought up by private equity groups who don't care about the company's revenues or their clients, they want that data. They figure out all kinds of freaky ways to monetize it. Maybe they don't disclose the student's actual grades, but they can derive a "hireability" score that is a direct reflection of the their grades. They can sell that data to anyone who will buy it, insurance companies, credit card companies, law enforcement, whoever. Who knows how good their security is, what other countries they outsource services to, who they allow access to it. And now they're training AI with it.
10+ years ago these colleges would have balked at handing over all their private FERPA-protected data to a third party, but now they all just think the cloud is the future. If you aren't in the cloud then you aren't "modern." Nevermind that virtually every big data breach you hear about these days could have been prevented if the data were kept private and housed on servers solely controlled by the owners of the data themselves, where you don't have to worry about open S3 buckets or leaked API keys. All these kids wanted was to get an education and before they know it their future is completely fucked because their schools refused to fight for their privacy.
