SCoPE: Seminars: Institutional concerns

Hi Sylvia,

Great questions you've raised! Here are a couple of examples of how some Canadian universities have responded:

Lakehead University outsourced its email service to Google and was challenged by Faculty Ass'n on basis of Patriot Act. Ruling landed in favor of the University: http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/4054/125/
Dalhousie students challenged University to offer email services that included social networking and collaboration tools - like those offered by Google. The US Patriot Act was on the minds of some of the Faculty members who responded in comments on this blog: https://blogs.dal.ca/its/2009/03/20/wantmore/
Academic libraries worked to have Refworks (popular US based research reference tool moved to Canadian servers). Prior to that, many were using disclaimers on their sites.
At UBC, we have been told (by our privacy office) that a disclaimer is important when discussing applications, tools and resources that have their servers based in the US and require students to sign up with email and disclosure of personal info. Here is an example of what we developed for LEAP (student academic support site): http://leap.ubc.ca/get-teched-up/social-software/social-bookmarking/

Re: Patriot Act

by Sylvia Currie - Sunday, 20 December 2009, 7:36 PM

Thanks for all these great resources, Cindy. The LEAP site is really neat, and I like the approach of putting in a disclaimer and educating learners, rather than implementing drastic rules about the use of social networking services at the institutional level.

Here's the info from the LEAP site:

Just remember, if you are signing up to a service that is hosted in the U.S., you’ll want to take note of the privacy policies before you give over your personal information. The U.S. has a different view of privacy protection than we do in Canada.