I think you have to look at it from a bigger picture. We could technically use Linux, next cloud and something not office365, but who would operate and maintain it? Almost none of the IT staff in the public sector (or in my case the entire country) knows how to operate these things, and a major part of them don’t want to learn because they can just leave for a better paying job with AWS or Azure in the private sector. The teachers and other employees know how to use office365 and Google education because they have used it all their lives. The developers making the education software similarly know how to do so on these platforms.

I get that someone needs to make the first move, but if it’s going to be done this way, where the schools themselves are punished for decisions they don’t make. Which is essentially what happens when a city is told it cannot use the chromebooks it has already bought or the educational plans that they have laid out for the year. So in order to protect the educational data from google (again, only in the one city that fucked up their paperwork and not all the other cities using google education or chromebooks) that city is going to have at least a year or schooling broken, and will have to find the money to pay for new options. Money that means even less teachers.

If you can think of a faster way to lose public support for the GDPR in general than that, then I’d applaud you, because I sure can’t.

Mean while, the same data protection agency that banned the chromebooks removed the option from parents to avoid having institutions upload photos of their children to a national app run in AWS.

Or in other words, if the legalisation thinks it can move the EU forward through punishments, then I think the EU is going to wake up without member states because nobody is going to want to pay for it with nurses and teachers.

And at the end it’s just access to the files, that a samba share does too, with native OS applications.