Three-quarters of Dutch university students’ data, such as their coursework and personal data, is stored in Microsoft and Amazon data centers. The FD concludes this based on an international investigation available to the newspaper. The study, a follow-up to an earlier study on cloud use in universities, will be officially released early next month.

Researchers from Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Informatics and the Vienna University of Technology looked at the storage of student data from 2015. At that time, according to them, a quarter of the Dutch data was in the cloud, now it’s three-quarters. In addition to personal data, research data and digital teaching systems could also be found in the data centers.

According to FD, student privacy is at stake and there is a risk that universities will become economically dependent on American tech companies.

dependency

The newspaper reports that professors and cyber experts have long called it undesirable for student data to be managed by commercial entities governed by US law. There is a risk that an American investigative service will demand access to Dutch private data.

Dutch universities tell the newspaper they don’t track how much they store in the cloud. The Dutch Universities Partnership (UNL) recognizes “the risk of being dependent on big tech companies”. The Federal Association of Student Unions (LSVb) believes that student data should not be stored with commercial companies at all.

Researchers fear that increasing cloud storage is undermining scientific integrity. According to one of them, there are well-known examples of scientists who studied Facebook algorithms, after which their personal account on the social network was blocked.

Take care of

According to FD, the reason why universities use the services of American technology companies is that developing their own systems is expensive, in their view. “But this benefit is a sham, the researchers warn, because they have to pay for more and more software licenses,” the paper says.

The university world has already sounded the alarm about the development, writes the FD. Three years ago, rectors warned that data from students and lecturers could be misused in the advertising market.

The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) also sounded the alarm last summer because of “the increasing dependence of universities on great techniqueThis happened in a study on the consequences of the corona pandemic for science.