Good excuses
The Cloud ate my homework!
It's not you – it's Google. The web giant's Docs cloud has fallen off the internet, leaving US office workers eyeing up the boozer early. The in-browser word processor is offline around the world, and returns a 502 error when accessing it. Google Drive is also struggling to stay up, it seems. The alleged productivity suite …
Ya'll might be wrong too - much to my dismay, I recently found that my local school district does *everything* on Google Classrooms. Now we're supposed to be given express notification and are to give permission to use that Google service yet have never seen it ever mentioned. Only reason I know anything about it, is that we've recently had to pull our daughter out of middle school and are now homeschooling her. The girl is thriving again.
I haven't seen a textbook from public school in years.
You'll find - if that school is anything like the ones I've worked for - that your parent/school agreement actually already covers giving details to third parties for school use. Otherwise everything, from the canteen, to the trip organisation, to medical notes, to god-knows-what has to be authorised time and time again throughout the year.
As such, there may be a "notification" clause but it's probably not compulsory (do you need to know that they've changed catering provider, for instance? And, yes, your catering provider will have access to personal information in the form of allergen lists and maybe even cash-less catering systems).
I know that many private schools - where I have worked for the last 7 years or so - have a basic contract that even covers use of photos etc. In state schools they give opt-outs, in private schools they tend not to. If you want to attend the school, they get permission to use your child's image in certain ways in order to promote the school (e.g. not identified [child protection], but stuck in a brochure, or leaflet or even parent newsletter).
Asking for permission for EVERY LITTLE THING is a really huge administrative burden. That's not to excuse such things as being "natural" in the course of running a school - they should at least tell you at some point - but Google etc. are the least of your worries there.
And, yes, I have spent many hours in state schools photoshopping out certain children from crowds. It's tedious and a waste of time, even if you understand the parental concern (which I don't if identifying information does not accompany such images).
"Customer acknowledges and agrees that it is solely responsible for compliance with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998, including, but not limited to, obtaining parental consent concerning collection of students' personal information used in connection with the provisioning and use of the Services by the Customer and End Users."
Nowhere does it state that parental consent cannot come from a pre-written contract that they sign that says that certain third-parties will be used for data processing etc. In fact, that's the only mention of any word with "parent" in it in the whole agreement.
All it says is that the school has to have consent. That could be prior, during, it could be explicit or implicit, it may not even mention Google by name at all. Hence why most schools have just a blanket agreement that - by agreeing to it - you are giving parental consent for the life of your child in that school to use such third parties for such purposes.
Otherwise an awful lot of schools would be sending out an awful lot of letters all day long, every day for every minor service they touch. The average primary school probably gives child data out to something like 50-100 organisations a year - everything from government departments (which are still governed by the same rules), third-party suppliers, software, online services, activities clubs, independent staff (e.g. peripatetic music teachers, job agencies), etc. etc. etc.
You can't give explicit, fine-grained permission because that quickly turns into a nightmare, so as a parent you're agreeing that "for school purposes" (normally) the school gets consent to share data with their selected third-parties. Otherwise, literally, there'd be a mountain of paperwork and nothing would ever get done.
"Better get rogered than not get kicked in the face?"
Exactly! There's the spirit.
Come on, admit it. Nothing beats the feeling of coming 'round one morning and realising all your stuff's gone and you've spent the last few years drugged out of your senses and shackled naked to the wall some megapimps purpose built gallery for the amusement of every sleazy corporation and agency willing to splash a couple of ‰ of 1¢ at your owner.
You feel so deliciously cheap and dirty and violated.
>Why over-complicate things? Just download LibreOffice & get on with writing.
To be fair, AFAIK Google Docs does have functionality that are very good for teachers - the best of which is constant revision control. No one can say they didn't save because as long as they are online every change is saved constantly.
Further, all those versions can give the teacher an insight as to the student's thought processes using the "view previous revisions" feature. You can see, for example, at one point the student tried to put Paragraph 3 first before deciding it fits better at the bottom. You can see though it is crap he at least pretended to work on his homework for 5 hours rather than 30 minutes which might be worth effort points. In fact, with special software you can in theory you can get data of every keystroke, since it is at base a keystroke logger and when you open your file, Google Docs actually reconstructs your file by stepping through all your keystrokes.
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HAHA! I am never without my important docs. I have a USB stick and a slack IT security department that still let's me plug in any stupid USB device. Probably even ones I could find in the streets. Good thing I'm still mostly sane.
I'll tell you what does suck even more though; android ice cream sandwich on my Sammy Tab 2 no longer lets me fetch local files, only ones stored on the G:drive. Perhaps it's something with my config, but if Wonky's Choco Factory is forcing my important crap into the cloud, then I will have to get a different device next time 'round, won't I?
Pun unintended, sorry.
What is the capacity of the interwebs between clients and google's various storages, and could it be that (and it pains me to say this) google might not be to blame? Friday lunchtime/afternoon (US) and early evening (UK) do seem to be prime panic-time for end-of day deadlines and end-of-week syncs and (badly timed or manual) backups, so was there something else in the middle that broke? Is someone's storage always at the nearest location?
Of course the safe-harbour thing might have meant the NSA and GCHQ had to implement some changes and these are what slowed it all down.
/randomtheorieswithadashoftinfoil