RSSUC-Davis rejects Google Apps solution
After going on about the headway that Google has made in some surprising markets offering Apps, and the Gmail component particularly, as a replacement for traditional on-premises e-mail solutions, it's only fair to talk about when they get stuffed at the basket, as well. Information Week is reporting such a rejection after a short pilot program at the University of California-Davis campus.
Unfortunately, it looks as if the failure was more a result of bad timing and that always important factor in academic environments, "feelings." It's always been a bit beyond me why academics, supposed paragons of study and intellectual developments in their fields, seem to cling more to gut reactions and less to cool, measured analysis, but I suppose the ivory tower insulates in both directions.
According to Information Week, the pilot was ended at the behest of the CIO and two campus IT chairs because "…faculty members doubted Google's ability to keep their correspondences private." This was based, apparently, mostly on a press-induced meme regarding privacy concerns with Buzz, a Gmail-integrated service that was not even part of the Apps package being evaluated at the university (and which, it bears mentioning, has better privacy control features than most competing products in its genre).
It further develops that there was some debate that Gmail might run afoul of a UC policy stating that the university must not disclose or examine the contents of e-mail without the account holder's consent, or distribute it to third parties. As stated, it's difficult to imagine too many modern mail systems that comply with those fine sentiments; the reality of modern spam and malware threats make messaging all but unusable without filtering, which necessarily invades the contents of messages, and often involves outside services that are far more efficient than strictly internal controls could be. With respect to Google's status as an entity that is susceptible to legal action that may force it to produce supposedly private mail, there are few providers who are not (including UC-Davis, should it decide to continue to host mail internally) and none are reliable.
I can make fun of technically uneducated college professors snapping at shadows all day long but that's a bit beside the point. There are actually two factors at work here. One is the degree to which privacy is achievable or even desirable in the traditional sense in a complex technical environment, a point over which well-meaning academics and mortals may disagree. It may surprise or horrify non-technical privacy seekers to realize that many of their well-intentioned efforts have little practical effect toward preserving true privacy, but instead simply concentrate the ability to breach it undetected in even more nefarious and nebulous hands than they imagined. With Google, if your privacy is somehow threatened, you at least know two things: one, the motivation they have for breaching it (indeed, they're happy to point this out and write it right into the terms of use) and two, the resources they have for keeping it to themselves. Those resources are formidable, certainly more so than any competing organization or solution can come up with. And that brings us to the second factor to consider in such debates: alternatives. Gmail may not offer perfect privacy, but what are the other options, and what true privacy and security can they offer?
I submit that a rationale analysis of that question will leave those leveling these objections spluttering. There are plenty of good reasons not to adopt Gmail; this isn't one of them.
