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Comment by dekhn | Hacker News Reader

That admins can read the emails in their managed accounts is working as intended. School accounts aren't for privacy, period.

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Maybe, but it should be disclosed, at least, and students reminded to only use these accounts for school-related stuff, then. And even then, I'm not sure that there should be no privacy in school accounts - what if you want to complain about a teacher? What if that teacher happens to be an admin and retaliates? Sure, there may be cases where having some oversight is good, but it's not necessarily clear-cut.

All the examples you're giving existed before school-provided email accounts. https://xkcd.com/1494/

I'm not disputing how things are, I'm giving my opinion on how things ought to be :)

Almost all schools have a acceptable use waiver the kids (and maybe parents) have to sign to use Internet and it calls out monitoring of internet etc. It's just nobody reads those terms.

Having the technical possibility doesn't mean you have the moral, corporate and legal rights to use that possibility.

Be it emails, databases, file servers, anything reading content from anything else but a test account/db/folder is a no go for a sysadmin/dba unless given explicit consent by the user owning that content.

This is not what the law says. This why courts absolutely will rule against such practices. And this is why if some person goes to court against that, the snooping admin will get into quite some trouble.

There is a big difference between being able to do something and being allowed to do something.

Of course the right to privacy applies to children as well, and to messaging in school between peers, just like in civilized jurisdictions it's illegal for employers to read read email between employees.

Except schools have a responsibility to ensure that they safeguard their students against online abuse which is extremely common between students. Students will routinely bully each other over school messaging systems so it's important schools have systems in place to deal with this.

This sounds like just an excuse for spying on students. There is plethora of methods to prevent bullying that do not require an all time access to students' communication.

Pervasive monitoring of private communications doesn't sound like the right tradeoff - more like "something must be done, this is something, therefore we must do it"[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politician%27s_syllogism

Please read up on the relevant legislation in NL before displaying your ignorance. Employers don't even have blanket access to their employees' email accounts because of privacy laws. The laws concerning minors are even stricter.

That's up to the account admins, not Google. The NL government is making a big mistake here: it's trying to keep things "local" to EU, and replacing products that are secure and private (while also providing admins with the necessary tools to implement policy) with ones that have far less engineering. \ I also don't think it's necessary to use the word "ignorance", as I read the article pretty carefully. I'm quite read up on GDPR- having implemented policies for a company I worked for- and often times when people say Google is not compliant with GDPR, they're dead wrong.

So if it's not ignorance of the law that's making you make silly statements like "school accounts aren't for privacy, period", what is?

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