Yes, it's bad and I fear it's widespread. I think I once heard Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya students have gmail accounts (that look like UPC mail, but it's handled by Google). It's hearsay, I don't know the exact situation now, or whether it's optional, or how are they informed or how do they consent if at all.
What I know is that last year I tried to enter a course in a private university in Barcelona (Blanquerna-la Salle) intended to make engineers, etc. high school teachers for "technical" subjects/studies. They opened each student an account in two virtual campus servers (presumably in the University) but required a gmail account for each student, and a teacher also required students to have a twitter account and a facebook account to do an exercise, because "one can't be a technology teacher if one isn't in facebook and twitter". I was there only a few days, so I don't know what else. But the impression I got was that the thoughtlessness in the requirements (both from teachers, staff and students) was even more frightening than the requirements themselves. Students were complaining that they needed to check three different accounts and two websites to be aware of schedule changes, assignments or readings or so on, and felt this was too much trouble, but I was the only one complaining of the fact that they had to be customers of arbitrary companies or accept third party terms of use in order to complete a master. Good luck out there. -- Xavi Drudis Ferran [email protected] _______________________________________________ Discussion mailing list [email protected] https://mail.fsfeurope.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion
