No FB, Instagram and possibly WhatsApp… Last one is still uncertain to be included, but I sincerely hope it will be. 
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Disclosure: a European currently employed at Google
So, I think it’d be awesome of Denmark ordered 100,000 or 200,000 system76 / tuxedo / framework laptops per year - have them run Fedora or Ubuntu on them. Not sure they can pull it off because of high support costs.
The problem is the back end, you need to hire and pay a few hundred people as level 1 tech support changing passwords and reimaging machines.
Then, you need about 50 people to deal with kerberos, webmail, backup storage, security, general distro support… let’s call this “backend”.
Denmark is more expensive than average US and has a small but healthy tech community, the salaries of these folks would cost as much as laptops (ballpark, otherwise those folks would just go work for Microsoft or Google or somewhere in Fintech), … and you probably need to rack some machines and buy some bandwidth, but that’s cheap beyond initial capex.
In general compared to DIY, Chromebooks+Workspace are cheap as chips.
There’s definitely other cheap “buy” options on the market, e.g. Microsoft 365 + Windows laptops, vendors like Lenovo or HP can ship pre-enrolled laptops , Apple has something similar. In either case you need more support staff than if you were to simply stick with the super locked down Chromebooks.
… and going with those other options also comes with data governance challenges of their own.
I wish more countries would come up with sort of a “Department of Public Data Works” , so they could dedup some of the logistics and staffing costs and support costs for public hospitals schools and workers in the public sector.
Also, I wouldn’t personally know what workspace data goes where. It’s definitely possible technically to do the work and configure thousands of microservices needed for something like this to just run in European datacenters, I don’t know where that stacks up on the priority lists. And one thing I also don’t know is how aligned is the “user data” classification in Google internally vs. EU “user data” classification - e.g. keeping more data in eu than needed means you can’t claim compliance, keeping less data in eu than needed means you fail compliance, not good either way.
Typical example, if you’re logged into workspace and browse random websites with Google ads, are cookies created server side and your browsing logs created by the server when your browser contacts them in order to fetch ads, are those user data or not, are they covered by workspace because you were logged in with that account or not… I’m not a gdpr expert, but if those server logs create an alternate identity that is never directly linked to your workspace account, is this user data as per gdpr? Would you as a user want those logs linked with your account, … or not?
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The moment that you’re logging anything with can be linked back to an individual (like the IP address for instance) or creating any form of identity (for advertising for instance), then you are in the realm of user data as defined by the GDPR.
I personally wouldn’t want this ad/tracking linked to any account.
From personal experience I know that primary and secondary education in NL just can’t get their IT done properly because of severe lack of funding. That certainly is an area where they’d need more help to get that sorted. But as you said, those IT people cost money they’re not getting budget for.
Some contexts for where my experience comes from; I’ve worked in private secondary and tertiary/higher education and currently in public higher education.
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Anyone have details on why they could not enable Data Regions? Data regions: Choose a geographic location for your data - Google Workspace Admin Help
Because US law says that they can still just take the data. That is the largest problem the GDPR has with any of the US companies.
You can have your data stored inside of the EU, but because of it being hosted by a US company, those companies are required by law to hand over the data regardless. You could say that the US government is the biggest spyware company in the world in that regard.
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I think after 30+ years, some states in the EU realized, that tech companies have grown from „partners“ into bullies and check their actions more throughout . I believe this has to do that the older generation of politicians retired and newer generations are more aware that a lot of the tech, it and videogame sectors are shitshows.
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I think the companies are now double dipping- they are now profiling and mining data, as well as selling hardware, and support contracts.
I would not be surprised if they are lowering the charges to beat out competition, because the data mined is more valuable anyway, but that is pure tin-foil hattery
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As a Dane my self, I would like to consider my country as the best in the world. Mostly, it actually is (pun?) but in this regard, there is something rotten in the state of Denmark…
Kids MUST go to school, they are obliged to do so by law. If they do not attend school, their parents may be punished in all sorts of ways. Now, when the kids go to school, they must use the Chromebooks loaned to them by the school and thereby hand over their data to Google - regardless of whether they (or their parents) want that or not. That’s not right. Even if the data where to be stored in and never leave the EU, it still seems wrong.
Exiting to see where this ends, some day… 
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Deeper than that, if it wrong to allow intrusive profiling and spying on kids who cannot give informed consent, then it is wrong to allow it in adults who understand the cost, but need to use the poisoned devices anyway.
Better to ban the collection, than the devices.
But, I am dreaming of a better world that would never happen.
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Yeah, we’re basically forcing everyone to hand over their data to Google as soon as they enter school this way. 
We need these machines as teaching aids. You can argue about blackboards having been fine for centuries, but in the modern world we actually can’t manage to prepare younglings for the digital life they’ll lead through such analogue means.
So the change needs to be forced to stop this profiling and data collection.
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For the people saying “why not Apple or Microsoft”, as far as I’m aware neither of these companies offer “free” cloud-based VLEs for schools. Both have cloud services, iCloud and One Drive respectively, but particularly after Covid lockdowns Google Classroom really took off as the defacto (and cheap) way of getting work to and from students, and lessons were and continue to be hosted on Google Meet. In theory Microsoft Teams could be used for this, but as far as I’m aware no one does use it in this way, and Apple just doesn’t have anything like this to restrict in the first place.
The fact that Google essentially re-utilised the now-defunct Google+ backend to acquire and sell the personal data of school children is indisputably evil imo.
On the subject of Teams, I think its saving grace is that it is so hilariously awful no one even wants to use it, so it’s not really on anyone’s radar. I find it funny when people are like “ew, why do you use Teams it’s terrible on Linux” as if 1) I have a choice and it’s not because my boss demands it, and 2) it runs no worse on Linux than it does on Windows. It’s just shit wherever you are lmfao.
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Classic Google move though.
Supporting a small fleet of machines and people using them, Teams is the number 2 complaint right after “it did that by itself”.
The common complaint I’ve seen on tech forums is “Google Workspaces for Education” requires a student to link their “personal” Google account vs the school issuing student accounts which opens up a can of privacy/profiling risks. The other risk I’ve also read about is Google ever changing terms of Workspaces for Education, there were a few universities which got themselves locked into having to shell out more money for storage when all Google accounts were downsized to 15GB shared between email, Docs & GDrive(in the past email was considered unlimited). In the higher education sector its quite common for prof/instructors/TAs having to fall back to sharing PDFs(lecture stuff) via Google Docs/Drive as its easier than Microsoft OneDrive.
Considering I’ve mostly used GDocs/GDrive for science/research work, much of the targeted ads in GMail is very useless at best.
MS actually offers quite significant discounts for the Education packages, which make is quite appealing. It comes with the added benefit that you can use the Office suite for the whole supporting staff as well, and by running Windows on your desktops can also use regular Windows applications.
ChromeOS is just way to handicapped for use outside of the couple classroom use cases. The idea of everything as web-based apps is not feasible for both staff and students who need to do design or rendering work for instance.
But for most primary/secondary schools, a browser is usually enough. That makes it that you see a clear split there between those using Chromebooks and MS suites.
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And if we put all data the data mining to the side, the next big concern is the branding effect… Children come to school for the first time, or after a summer break, and are excited and open for new lectures and knowledge and in that regard they have their parades down and their skepticism tucked away (mom said it’s gonna be great!). Then the first thing that welcomes them is the Google logo, the next thing is Google this and Google that and in that way they are impregnated with Google being something good and that may stick for the rest of their lives. I wonder how much that is worth to Google? My guess is: A LOT!
In this post, Google is called out as the bad guy; It could as well have been Microsoft or Apple or something completely different. Brand neutrality should be a requirement when dealing with kids, but that seems pretty far fetched these days.
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Ideally you would remove any branding, because that is certainly worth a whole lot for those companies. The schools are paying for the privilege of imprinting our most impressionable demographic with their branding. That’s just wrong…
I understand that you can’t completely get away from that. But with the pervasive nature of these companies in the tech worlds, it would be nice to actually educate them before they get a choice made for them.
I would love to see more open source options, but there you come into the problems of lack of (paid) support, higher maintenance costs and needing to train everyone on a system they’re not already familiar with.
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I did not kind the indoctrination-for-discount as much, even though people settle into grooves for life.
But, it is for Sure a real thing. Especially for normies who want things to “just work” which is a fair request
I would be surprised if the tech firms didn’t have a dollar figure of worth. Then they know how much leeway to offer tiers of discounts to tiers of education levels.
I don’t mean to imply the products are not good, and not worth money, but the value of indoctrination and branding, should be offset by discounts on products. Then the added profiling in to makes extra money at the cost of the victim.
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I remember that with Facebook they mentioned something about the account worth per quarter some years ago 
I think it was something with “lost profits” due to blocking of something or the like… But I’m not certain there. Though that was due to advert losses. Not even brand recognition/worth.
And yeah, the products themselves are fine! I have no problems with paying for them, but I would like to cut out the profiling. Or rather; I would like to have those tech giants cut up into different actually separate companies which wouldn’t be able to just share their data. That way you would have to (more) openly deal in data transfers and the costs of the separate services and value of the profiles would become more transparant.
But as long as those companies have more budget to just pay fines instead of complying to regulations, then it doesn’t happen…
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The EU does not care about size, thank the gods. They stand for personal privacy and punish any size business if they break the rules. A lesson the US Gov should learn if they can stop the NSA plundering data centers around the world.
The siphoning of personal info for profit is a business model that should be ended with extreme prejudice.
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yes, I know that students actually get free access to Office 365 (but staff don’t, interestingly). I think the actual VLE is the bigger issue, though. As much as I’d love all school to be using FOSS software, I don’t think any meaningful tracking is being done via Microsoft Word. Google Classroom, however, is an entirely different kettle of fish.
I know that Microsoft Teams is used extensively in business, but in my experience it is not touched by school students.
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