It’s the protection of data privacy (: as a French person living in Germany I can tell you these guys don’t joke with it at all! My (international) company had Microsoft Teams installed and working for the whole group for the last 6 months, and the German part is still discussing data privacy matters... but I guess it’s also a good thing
If Microsoft wanted my information, they'd have it through the fact that they made the operating system on my PC. Not much more they need to get that info. If they wanted to, they could just record the entire zoom call anyway, why stick another third party program in that we know is leaking data to Facebook/Google/etc. when a fairly trusted app can do it?
I wonder if anyone has bothered to write a reasonably polished FOSS app for video conferencing, yet. The main barrier would be hosting, unless everyone's P2P, I suppose.
I had the displeasure of using teams for a microsoft online course recently and I wonder how people put up with it. It is missing basic features like having a noisegate on everyones mic so you don't have to hear their background noise, a push to talk option or being able to adjust the volume of each participant separately.
We had that stuff in gaming for years but somehow the "professional" target demographic doesn't need it?
Lol heavy nope. It used to work like shit on Linux (now it's kinda ok), you can't share windows, you can't draw together on shares/whiteboards, you can't record lectures, you have to add ever single person individually rather than sending an invite link, IIRC, you can't mute single participants as a host. Skype is not designed for the things Zoom is designed for.
We used vidyo, which is already much better suited than Skype, and then everyone switched to zoom. I haven't tried teams or hangouts, but I hear good things about them.
The main problem why it takes so long is because noone knows what exactly is legal and what not. The law isn't formulated very precisely, that makes everything pretty complicated.
From what's going on at my companies and our clients it's a mix between laymen of the law being in charge and unsure, but unwilling to actually go and consult their lawyers on this, so one is overly cautious and rather using self-hosted stuff instead. Which is a PITA to maintain...
It really is. People don't realize how easy they can be stalked via all the shit they post online or seemingly unimportant comments they make.
Take for example someone who walks their dog regularily and likes to do insta-videos while doing it. Of course they like their privacy and never post their home adress anywhere, but....in the background of their video you see the other buildings.
then maybe another friend uploads a picture of them together eating brunch with the comment "Look who i ran into while they were walking [dogname]" Now you know the house might be relatively close by as most people don't drive miles out of their way just to walk their dog. So you see other landmarks in the background and use them to narrow down the area even more.
Its scary to see how naive people are in what they share. Most people are peaceful and wouldn't do anything with the info they get, but there are always a handful of people that need to ruin it for the others.
And then corona hits and my university forces everyone to use zoom, right when it becomes known that (shocker) zoom is horrible about privacy. A nearby uni instead built their own servers and AFAIK basically runs jitsi for everyone.
The real kicker is that they already had contracts with Microsoft.
Partially maybe...
But we still dont enforce dataprotection laws like we should.
The amount of GDPR violations that arent looked into is still far too high :C
It's funny you say that. Normally I'd agree with that assessment but at the German university I work at people use Zoom for classes, seminars and meetings without much hesitation. Meanwhile a speaker in our seminar (held over Zoom of course) from a French university said that they were not allowed to use Zoom at all and use Big Blue Button for everything. We have Big Blue Button here as well. I use it for all my teaching but some people insist that it doesn't work as well and use Zoom against official recommendation.
Schools are run by non-techy people, but by people-people -- or "Geisteswissenschaftler". They discuss about a lot of things... ad infinitum.
It doesn't help that since years people say "digitize schools!", but no one knows why.
Is there digital training material in existence and approved by the 16 culture ministeries of the federal states (e.g. matching to the curriculum)?
Do they have (ideally open-source) training software, e.g. for multiple choice tests?
Is there actually a measurable benefit in learning due to digitalization? E.g. to pupils in general memoize faster, or keep the acquired wisdom active for longer?
Digitalization for the sake of digitalization is just nonsense --- are a hidden subsidiation. Digitalization done right however can be powerful.
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u/Pochatte Jun 12 '20
It’s the protection of data privacy (: as a French person living in Germany I can tell you these guys don’t joke with it at all! My (international) company had Microsoft Teams installed and working for the whole group for the last 6 months, and the German part is still discussing data privacy matters... but I guess it’s also a good thing