Some time ago Linköping University proudly announced that they were outsourcing their student email to Google. Basically the students will see the university email address but “under the hood” the system will be run by Google. The BBC reports (11 June) that Trinity College Dublin is doing the same thing.

Google email (gmail) has some privacy issues:

Google automatically scans e-mails to add context-sensitive advertisements to them. Privacy advocates raised concerns that the plan involved scanning their personal, assumed private, e-mails, and that this was a security problem. Allowing e-mail content to be read, even by a computer, raises the risk that the expectation of privacy in e-mail will be reduced. Furthermore, e-mail that non-subscribers’ choose to send to Gmail accounts is scanned by Gmail as well… (wikipedia)

So an uninformed gmail user may be losing some integrity. This is bad but at the same time it can be seen as a question of choice. (Don’t get me started on the problems of uninformed choice). But now the universities are pushing students to become gmail users. In Sweden universities are publicly funded government bodies and therefore they should be more concerned about forcing citizens to become customers of a private corporation.

Generally people are not to aware of the privacy risks which technology may create. Universities should help people to understand society and it is a shame that they are now acting as a sales representative for a company providing them with customers instead of acting as an example and educating citizens about the advantages and disadvantages of technology.