The internet has been hailed as a democratic tool that opens services and content to individuals all over the world. In fact, most of the content in the internet is free. We can watch videos on Youtube, listen to music on Spotify, communicate via Skype, have access to a detailed lexicon on Wikipedia, and so on and so forth… And everything for free. Of course, they replicate services that available in the past by TV, radio, telephone and public libraries. On the other hand, there are new services like Google that allow for searching information and Facebook that permits social interaction with our “friends” which are all available for free. This “free of charge” claim is of course deceptive. Especially for the last two mentioned examples, we do pay by providing these large companies with our data which they can analyze and exploit for commercial purposes.
Of course, there are regulations that try to enforce data protection. Nevertheless, the call for regulations is very heterogeneous from country to country. I am a German that lives in Sweden and very puzzled by the very different approaches with respect to privacy concerns. In this post, I will reflect on this situation and describe its impact on online learning.
Like the other Scandinavian countries, Sweden is a very open society when it comes down to data-use. There is very detailed information held by government institutions about individuals conveniently stored digitally. This is actually an advantage for empirical researchers in social sciences (especially in my field of economics) allowing them to investigate measures in a detailed manner that are not feasible in other countries. People are well identified by a personal number also allowing to match different data sets and thereby constructing a comprehensive image of an individual. Given that this is government information, everyone should be able to retrieve it. Basic information such as telephone number, birthday and year, address, marital status, and car ownership can be quickly retrieved by a quick internet search for each individual. Other more sensitive information such as income is available by request at the authorities. The underlying idea is that if everything is open, no one dares to do something which violates the social norm. For example, as they are publically available very high levels of income are considered “excessive” which manifests itself in low income inequality in Sweden.
The situation is Germany is almost diametrical. Germans have very severe concerns regarding the use of their data. This entails their use by the government, international enterprises (e.g. the tech giants Google and Facebook), and their free publication in the internet. To some extent this can of course be explained by their recent history of undemocratic and fascist governments. Not only the Nazi regime, but even more importantly and recently the GDR in Eastern Germany kept a dense net of spies that intruded in the private life of their citizens. As a recent example of German data phobia, I encountered a website of a choir that advertise themselves online, but censored the faces of the members on the marketing photos due to “privacy concerns”.
How does this impact on Online Learning? Here in Sweden, we use the learning platform Canvas. In this platform sensitive information of the individuals (most importantly their grades) are stored. Canvas is a US-American commercial enterprise and as such not available in countries such as Iran, Venezuela or North Korea. German universities and their students have strong fear of entrusting this US enterprise with their student’s data and thus would rather go to self-developed – and thus also lower performance – platforms. Of course, both extremes of either making data public goods or the complete refusal of data-storage – leading to a cutting-off from new technological advances – are not beneficial. Yet, I don’t want to take a personal stand here. I leave this to the comments.
