The University of Alberta is in the process of deciding whether to outsource its e-mail to Google in a move that has some critics concerned about privacy.
“Google wants to take all of our faculty and students and turn them into lifelong Googlers,” said project organizer Jonathan Schaeffer said. “They want to make people fall in love with Google’s tools.”
Although several universities have allowed Google to take over e-mail for students, Lakehead University in Thunder Bay is the only Canadian university that has allowed Google to control faculty e-mail, said James Turk, executive director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers.
“Google is desperate to get a major university to sign on to this,” he said. “It will be a huge feather in Google’s cap if they can get a Canadian university like the University of Alberta.”
Schaeffer said outsourcing to Google will ultimately benefit the entire university and provide a better alternative than the current system which has more than 30 independent e-mail systems.
Schaeffer said choosing to outsource to Google would come with many benefits, including saving the university $2 million a year, enabling university-wide calendaring and freeing overworked information technology personnel on campus.
“It doesn’t make sense to have 30 systems on campus. It causes a lot of duplication,” Schaeffer said.
He said the systems would ideally be replaced with one campus-wide system, but this would cost millions of dollars. The alternative is to have the system hosted by a company outside of campus, and Google is the leading candidate.
Schaeffer said companies like Microsoft and Apple have been giving discounted or free items to the university for years and now Google wants to do the same.
According to Schaeffer, eight or nine universities are lined up behind the U of A to try the outsourcing if the university decides to go with Google.
“We’re doing all the heavy lifting, if you will,” Schaeffer said.
However, Turk said the outsourcing may be too good to be true and is “absolutely not” necessary.
“In Canada, the concern with Google running e-mail services has to do with privacy, and governmental agencies and security authorities having access to the content of our e-mail and the ability to control it if they take it over because of the [United States] Patriot Act,” Turk said.
“I’m surprised, quite frankly, that the University of Alberta would even consider it,” he said.
According to Turk, the Google contract gives the FBI and CIA the right to demand any records in possession of corporations linked to the United States. Google is obligated to turn over any records requested by an American security agency. A person cannot be notified if their records have been requested.
“As soon as Google runs e-mail, this will be the case since it’s a USA-linked corporation,” he said.
The U of A remains in negotiations with Google and will not sign the contract unless Google meets the university’s standards.
Schaeffer said the University of Alberta is set to make their decision within the next month, and many Canadian schools will be watching closely to see what they choose to do.