Brazilian university is submissive to foreign technology – Brazil Mail

bureaucratized and inert, the Brazilian public university delivery Google and Microsoft educational services and strategic communication. In the era of knowledge economy, the country can conform to the submission

By Rafael Evangelista – São Paulo

weary of attacks and constant budget cuts, public universities will not seem to exist anymore. Maintain the minimum, but are making slow cuts imply in practice and in the medium term, the assignment to private partners on several things that define who historically part of its mission. With this, they will abdicating its intellectual autonomy and implementation of technologies in accordance with its public principles.

north American systems capture sensitive information from Brazilian projects

the latest and most striking example comes from the area information Technology. Google and Microsoft have established partnerships with several Brazilian public universities to offer “educational technologies”. In practice, the institutions will open up its computer park, while promoting the products of partners. Students, staff and faculty receive often emails coming from the computer centers of universities calling for membership services. With done institutionally invitation is easy to predict the result:. Adoption of foreign technologies rather than something produced and managed autonomously

For the most part, are applications that the university already offers, as and service -mail and technological tools of educational monitoring. Unicamp, one of which established agreements, provides e-mail service and tools like Moodle, a free software produced collaboratively; and Teleduc also free tool but designed by the Nucleus of Informatics Applied to Education. Now the free initiatives compete with GAFE, Google Apps for Education, a Silicon Valley company’s service already highly criticized by international organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which maintains the campaign “Spying on Students: educational systems and the privacy of students. “

the official discourse of the university is the freedom of choice. Each individual would be free to choose which technology to use, individually weighing any facilities against risks and losses. Gives even to call “Microsoft fallacy”, so much that the company used this type of argument when fighting the free software incentive policies. But in the real world things do not work exactly like that, individuals not independent and absolute beings in a power vacuum. Money weighs as well as advertising and interconnection between products. On the one hand, we have universities always pressure to cut costs. On the other, billionaires companies interested in the navigation data and content produced by students, able to economically exploit this information (in the advertising or where their imagination allow market). Everything is offered for free but if it is true neoliberal said that “there is no free lunch”, we can only imagine that companies know very well how to extract value of informational mass.

The outcome is not hard to to imagine. Public institutions tend to abandon the provision of such educational infrastructure services, making cuts and reducing costs, but at the same time abdicating its mission to produce and apply technologies in its student body. Can you also imagine that those who do not join the majority, the “boring” who insist on discussing and discuss technological decisions will have to live with an increasingly scrapped and abandoned service. The strategy here resembles that of another technology giant, Monsanto, which was producing a fait accompli in favor of GMOs, in order to force the acceptance of varieties of its soybeans via contamination.

And, of course, we need to talk about privacy and surveillance in universities. federal institutions like the UFPE and UTFPR already use GAFE (the acronym is a great comic effect in Portuguese, register) and others, such as Unifesp, now studying its adoption. But in the wake of revelations of Edward Snowden, there is a federal decree (8135, 2013), says in its first article that “data communications direct federal public administration, autonomous agencies and foundations should be made by telecommunications networks and information technology services provided by agencies or entities of the federal public administration, including public enterprises and joint stock companies of the Union and its subsidiaries. ” Apparently, the agreements do not conform to the decree, whose real concern was the inviolability of communications.

University at risk

Criticism EFF made in the US context, in this direction. She has filed a complaint to the Federal Trade Commission (Federal Trade Commission) accusing Google of violating agreements establishing the ban on sale of student information and the need for transparent policies on the collection and use of data. After complaints, Google has disabled data collection from students for advertising purposes in GAFE services. However, on other platforms interconnected by the same password used in GAFE worth the same rules as all other services such as Drive, Blogger, YouTube and Gmail: Users are monitored and electronically monitored time all for extraction purpose information to be used with advertising purposes, in addition to being subjected to ads chosen from these navigation data.

the use of email is in particular especially dangerous. In the case of the university, it is a special mass of users, bringing together researchers active in the production of knowledge and sensitive technologies. This information does not get on Brazilian soil, or respond to Brazilian law. They are in California, governed by the laws of that US state. At the same time that they omit and do not encourage the use of encrypted data from their users, universities transfer databases to countries that notoriously abuse surveillance also for economic purposes.

And there is issue of economic exploitation of the university database itself as a resource to be mined to extract information that will guide product development, marketing campaigns, identify behavioral tendencies etc. The academic community sins in not recognizing the very high economic value of these data and naively thinking seems to be doing a good exchange. In the short term, makes life easier for the administrator squeezed with shrinking budgets. In the medium and long term, threatens the jobs of the staff of the university and technological autonomy. Outsourced in its structure – safety, cleanliness, food, and in a sense even in teaching, with collaborators professors and graduate students – squalid, it is unable to fulfill its social function, which goes far beyond the manpower training the market.

Since the early 2000s, in conflictual disputes of the World Trade Organization, the rich countries are trying to establish rules that allow them to sell services such as educational packages to poor countries. Apparently, they found new ways to profit from the same package, the amount of extraction was on top of databases and information.

Rafael Evangelista is a doctor in social anthropology and Master teacher in Science Communication and Cultural IEL-Unicamp

.