Dima Pasechnik wrote: > Hi Simon, > the question is delicate; I know that in UK there is a number of universities > using SMC for teaching purposes. > As well as in some other countries (William can give details on this, I > suppose); as well, some MOOCs probably use SMC. And, finally, Andrew, the > original poster, is in Sydney, Australia. > > IMHO your university is unclear in its position; first of all, one has to > define what "personal information" means.
Two lawyers, (at least) three opinions. Especially in such cases. I guess they -- understandably -- also want to avoid any chance of getting sued, but I'd personally agree with them here (putting restrictions on any kind of data which *might* look like personal records). > They might be right in saying that an official exam, and its records, cannot > be held on > overseas computer systems. Again guessing, but I bet their statement includes "cloud" services in general, a fuzzy (marketing) term at least meanwhile implying anti-transparency (w.r.t. where data is transferred to, stored, and processed), and vulnerability. > How about GCE servers located in EU? > Is it legal? This way data does not leave the EU (probably, I don't know for > sure). Again a grey area, as AFAIK in the past the U.S. government at least tried to force U.S. (parent) companies to hand out data physically located elsewhere, such that they tend to get into the dilemma of violating either U.S. or European (or other national) law, not to mention alleged practice of some agencies. > In UK surely students can be asked to do coursework (we do not have any > official continuous assessments, so I guess quizzes would be just fine, too) > on SMC, nobody will blink at it. For less critical data (such as ordinary exercises), it would IMHO be sufficient / safe enough to let the students sign an agreement (or some privacy declaration), provided they still have the option to e.g. submit their work / results by other means [without getting discriminated in some way in case they do]. But it's probably already too difficult to in legal sense correctly formulate such documents -- especially when it comes to "cloud" services... ;-) (How proper "anonymization" would perhaps in addition have to happen is just another controversial aspect I'd say.) -leif > On the other hand, I cannot copy their academic records and other things like > their home addresses, anywhere outside the University, and even so only under > a number of conditions. > > Dima -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-support" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-support+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to sage-support@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/sage-support. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
