[Infowarrior] - Google's security and privacy are not good enough

[Richard Forno]

Google's security and privacy are not good enough

University of California snubs Gmail
By Edward Berridge
Thu May 06 2010, 11:38                 

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1635116/google-security-privacy

A US UNIVERSITY has said that Google's commitment to privacy and security doesn't meet its standards.

According to Information Week, Gmail failed a University of California at Davis evaluation as the official e-mail program for its 30,000 faculty and staff members.

UC Davis' CIO Peter Siegel, academic senate IT chair Niels Jensen, and campus council IT chair Joe Kiskis said the school decided to end its Gmail pilot because faculty members doubted Google's ability to keep their correspondence private.

Many faculty "expressed concerns that our campus's commitment to protecting the privacy of their communications is not demonstrated by Google and that the appropriate safeguards are neither in place at this time nor planned for in the near future," the letter said.

Google insists that its privacy controls are adequate, although it admits that there are lots of opinions and voices on campuses.

The University of California report cited a recent letter to Google CEO Eric Schmidt from the privacy commissioners of ten countries, including Canada, the UK, and Germany that slammed the outfit for its recent addition of Google Buzz to Gmail.

Buzz adds social networking tools that the commissioners said compromise user privacy.

However Google pointed out that Buzz was not part of the Gmail package under evaluation at UC Davis.

UC Davis said that "outsourcing e-mail may not be in compliance with the University of California Electronic Communications Policy", which forbids the university from disclosing or examining the contents of emails without the account holder's consent and from distributing emails to third parties. µ