Office 365, Google Docs, iWork were banned today in Germany, three of the largest platforms for managing documents can no longer be used by students in the schools of a federal state, for now. The German federal state of Hesse/Hessen is the one where schools have banned the use of Office 365, Google Docs, iWork, and this is because of concerns regarding the way in which the data of students who upload documents to the platforms are stored online.
Office 365, Google Docs, iWork are not prohibited mainly because documents are stored within the platforms, but because telemetric data are transferred from school computers to servers in the US. The German authorities claim that this data can include information about computer software, information about emails, their subject, the information in them, and not only that, although this data does not actually end up in Office 365, Google Docs, iWork.
Office 365, Google Docs, iWork were BANNED in Germany
Office 365, Google Docs, iWork are practically completely blocked in schools in Germany, but they can use the offline version of Microsoft Office to work with documents, and allow their students to do the same. If the students could have given their consent for various data to be transferred to the servers behind Office 365, Google Docs, iWork, then the prohibition would not have existed today, but the law does not allow this, so a radical decision was made .
Office 365, Google Docs, iWork could also be banned in other German states after a single one made such a decision, unless the German federal government makes a decision that will automatically apply to the entire country. Now it will be very interesting to see what Microsoft, Google, and Apple have to say about this, especially the latter, which promotes everywhere that its products are safe and do not transfer data of this kind.
