6 Use Cases

6.1 Google Apps for the Geneva students

Since 2011, the “Département de l'Instruction Publique (DIP)” of the Geneva state has deployed an online collaborative platform using Google Applications for the students and the teachers. This set of free web software includes a mail, a shared storage area, shared agendas and other collaborative tools. This eduge.ch domain may be used as part for lessons, homework or communication. It is available from any place with an access to the Internet.

I have interviewed Mr Laurent Bezault, advisor in educational information systems for the DIP, in order to understand how students' anonymity and personal data are preserved while using online Google applications.

Quentin Bernigaud: Hello, how many teachers and students are currently concerned by the eduge.ch project ?
Laurent Bezault: The project is potentially available to the whole population of 7390 teachers and more than 24,000 students of the “Secondaire 2”. There are also some experiences running on for the college pupils, in order to sensitize them to the use of online tools.

QB: When was released this project ?
LB: The application deployment was iterative during the last 5 years. We started with 4 schools in order to identify technical and legal risks and then find solutions or reduce their impact.

QB: How Google tools are used ? How personal data are protected ?
LB:As Google servers are not in Switzerland, the system shall not contain any personal data. Moreover, exchanges with the rest of the world are reduced to the minimum: the emails can circulate but not the documents from the storage area: they are shared only for the eduge.ch users.
Thanks to these limits, we can advantage of the Cloud power with minimal risks: easy collaborative work, use of personal mobile devices, teachers doing live monitor of documents written by group of students …

QB: Google is well known for its usage of BigData. What did you do to avoid abuses ?
LB:A custom education directory was created for this project: it does not contain any sensitive information. The only complete information is the first name, the school, the class and the lessons of the users. For the name of students, we are using a pseudo-anonymisation by removing the vowels. For example, your login would be Quentin.Brngd. Enough to protect from robots parsing data, and readable for humans. A fully anonymous system would hinder collaborative activities (who is 4567631@eduge.ch ?).
Thanks to this anonymised directory, we can manage the login to external systems like Google Apps.

QB: What users think about this project ?
LB: Well, they are quite pleased. Of course, some of them are open-source supporters, so the Google firm is scaring them a little. This is also a small percentage of persons disliking new technologies like the Internet and the Cloud. It is not a problem since eduge.ch usage it not mandatory: they are simply not using it !
By contrast, the teachers motivated in using it are very glad to find new ways to expand their pedagogy: They can do more sharing, more collaborative activities: this is in line with the core meaning of their educational job.

QB: What about the security of the documents ?
LB:he Cloud of Google is obviously redundant with a guaranteed permanent access. By contract, Google should not index the data of the domain eduge.ch. User profiling is also forbidden. The data remains internally and all the exchanges with the internet browsers are encrypted, using the https protocol. Of course, the NSA issue is present, but this is a more global problem.

QB: What is the cost of this solution ?
LB:Google Apps cost around 40€ per user and per year for private companies. But for education and international organizations, this is simply free with an unlimited storage !

QB: What is the lifetime of e-mails and documents ?
LB: E-mails and documents of the student are kept during his school time. He can easily back it up because they are downloadable in open-data format, namely readable by free software. Some times after his departure, his account and his files are definitively deleted from Google servers without any way to recover them.

6.2 Confidentiality and dependencies in the digital society

On January the 14th , 2016, Frédéric Prost, member of the IMAG of the University Joseph Fournier (Grenoble, France) held a conference which included a section about the confidentiality on the internet.

The right to oblivion is linked to the ever-increasing capacity of the online storage. In particular, the massive recording of meta-data allows the sharp tracking of any phone calls, because these meta-data are small, well structured and easier to analyse than the complete data set.

The rise of the Big Data implies more available data but also mean more means to treat this huge amount of information. For example, the first decoding of the human genome took almost 10 years. 15 years later, this can be done in only 3 days, for the price below 1000$.

Frédéric Prost has showed several use cases of the Big Data, from targeted advertising as we have seen in this TPE, to sociology or even the impact on the US presidential election.

As the amount of communications (and of people) does not rise as fast as the Big Data power, he notes that the mass surveillance has already won the volume race: we can no longer hide in the mass.

Several problems were then described, mainly at the constitutional level:

• data encryption, once a “war weapon” in France, became legal and then became required in some cases.
• The digital ID attributed to each person while surfing has frightening similarities to the tattoos of the deportees of WWII. In 2006, Narayan and Shamtikov were able to identify 99% of the Netflix users writing anonymous comments, just by cross-checking with their Netflix personal information).

In conclusion, the question is not how to stop Internet, (this is nearly impossible due to its conception), but rather how individuals and States have changed their mind in order to use it (Arab spring, Snowden initiative against NSA actions) or, worse to control people.