[burner47]

I remember being part of a School District who was GAFE for 5 years before Google rolled out its "Google Vault" feature. You enable it to give yourself access to email/google docs ediscovery for FOI requests.

Creepy thing is, when we turned it on we could see deleted emails including spam, everything imaginable that had been sent, received, or created for the entire previous years we had been a GAFE School. Before Google Vault even existed. We don't have control over the collected data, these companies just give us the illusion of it by letting us disable our own access to it.

Don't want Google now notification for in store deals on your android phone? Ok, you can disable it...but Google is still tracking what stores you go to when and where.

A big thing I've seen that keeps schools in GAFE is affordability and ease of management. IT department workloads plummet, so no arguments from them. Also imagine the nightmare of trying to export all of your google docs to another platform somehow.

I don't like it and it isn't right, but before this can change I think we'll need good open cloud alternatives with easy migration paths. As far as chromebook hardware is concerned, we'll need another viable cheap alternative that respects privacy.

[jstanley]

CopperheadOS is a mobile OS based on Android (AOSP, specifically) which doesn't ship any closed-source code and takes your security and privacy seriously.

I'm nothing to do with the project, I just like it.

https://copperhead.co/android/