The Greek government has chosen #cisco webex for distance education.
For many months, the Ministry of Education had been refusing to publish the contract.
On 22/03, it got published:
- The MoE bought licenses that costed € 2 million - instead of using a #foss solution, e.g. BigBlueButton, that would cost no license fees and would empower the local economy
- The contract permits Cisco to use data of the 1.5 million users of the platform for its own purposes and disclose it to others
The article is in Greek, but you can find the excerpt about data sharing in English. The whole text of the contract is also included in the article (PDF).
@dimitrisk thanks, I'll cite this on my radio show.
@mmu_man Oh great, where can I find your show?
@dimitrisk
it's on the local french radio, and as a podcast here:
@dimitrisk My university is in theory also using webex - of course also with a secret contract.
In practice, at least the computer science faculty is using a self-hosted BigBlueButton instance. One of the reasons for that is that webex is often not even able to provide working video streams in their webclient (so no camera and screensharing), and there is no native client for all platforms.
The contract can of course not be published because it contains "trade secrets" of Cisco.
It reminds me of the first days of distance education with webex in Greece; the system was not usable.
Even though I am not familiar with the German law, in case you are studying in a public university, I suppose that “secret contracts” does not make any sense. Public money should mean public code; at least, transparency on public spending should be absolutely necessary.
@dimitrisk Luckily it is possible to get access to the contract in theory, but initially the Uni rejected the request. That was opposed, and since then there has not been any answer from the Uni except for confirming that the result of the request was officially opposed.
https://fragdenstaat.de/anfrage/vertrag-der-freien-universitat-mit-cisco/
@dimitrisk some official source (journal?) ?