A proposal to automatically create Google Gmail electronic mail accounts for all students sparked heated debate that led to postponement in the De Anza Associated Student Body Senate Wednesday.
The proposal would route all De Anza College e-mail communication, including "Pay to Stay" reminders, enrollment confirmations and important dates, to a new set of accounts provided by Google after a one-year transitional period, according to Bradley Creamer, De Anza’s webmaster.
Some senators were concerned that students who do not use the Internet would be forced to use the system.
"Maybe they just don’t want one," said senator Zahra Noor. "I don’t see how Google will help them."
Executive Vice President Bernardo de Seabra said he shared Noor’s concerns. De Anza will be able to say it’s the student’s fault if the student does not use the assigned e-mail account, said de Seabra.
"With the school mandating, this brings a serious problem." Creamer said students could use the accounts to forward emails to another account to consolidate e-mails, and that it could be set up to retain a record of of- ficial correspondence.
However, he said there would be a steep learning curve, especially for students who do not use the Internet already.
About 10 percent of De Anza students – approximately 3,000 people – do not receive e-mails from the college, said Creamer, due to invalid e-mail addresses and because some students fail to provide e-mail addresses when applying to the college.
Google was chosen over Yahoo and Microsoft because of cost, implementation and "in the current political environment, Google is the only company fighting for privacy," said Creamer.
Google is willing to provide the service, including an "@deanza.edu" suffix, for free.
Thursday, Google’s Senior Policy Counsel Andrew McLaughlin, defended the company’s decision to create a Chinese counterpart in a statement to the U.S. Congressional Human Rights Caucus.
Google’s Chinese Web site, google.cn, is subject to forms of censorship consistent with Chinese law.
The statement was posted on Google’s blog, googleblog. blogspot.com. According to McLaughlin, Google has vowed not to offer services like Gmail and Blogger until it is satisfied it can protect its users’ privacy.
On Jan. 19, the U.S. Justice Department sought a way to force the search engine giant to hand over records of millions of search queries and a random selection of one million indexed sites, according to a Jan. 20 New York Times news article.
Google has refused to comply with an Aug. 2005 subpoena, issued by the government in an attempt to support its defense of the Child Online Protection Act, a law passed in 1998 that imposes criminal penalties on Web site owners with pornography and offensive material that children can easily access.
Google said the request was "unnecessary, overly broad, would be onerous to comply with, would jeopardize its trade secrets and could expose identifying information about its users," according to the article, entitled "Google Resists Subpoena Of Search Data."
This article appears in the Feb. 6, 2006 print edition of La Voz.
