Pascal Braun is afraid of the Stone Age, which is why he is currently campaigning with verve for the software of the American technology group Microsoft. A few weeks ago, the vocational student from Karlsruhe started an online petition on the website change.org with the catchy title: “Against the ban on Microsoft products in schools in Baden-Württemberg”. More than 7,000 people already support the petition, and he wants to bring it to the state parliament's petition committee soon. "This ban would throw us back in our everyday school life in the Stone Age," it says. “We cannot accept that, especially in the current pandemic times and beyond.” The Microsoft Office 365 product is used extensively, even in authorities. “That's why we don't understand why we shouldn't be allowed to go to schools.“A similar petition in Hessen has already been completed: It has more than 16,000 supporters.

It is still just a recommendation

Corinna Budras

Business correspondent in Berlin.

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    The warning about the “ban” is formulated in a somewhat pointed manner, there is still no formal ban in Baden-Württemberg on the use of office products in schools. The state data protection officer of Baden-Württemberg, Stefan Brink, points this out. He must feel personally addressed as the addressee of the petition. "I did not ban the software, on the contrary, I spent months trying to find a legally compliant solution," he clarifies. But these efforts have failed, a few weeks ago he wrote in a recommendation for the Ministry of Culture in Stuttgart: The risks involved in using Microsoft services are "unacceptably high" in the school sector. The schools do not have complete control over the overall system and cannot understandwhich personal data are processed, how and for what purposes. Furthermore, they could not prove that the processing was reduced to the minimum necessary for this purpose. In the next school year one will have to investigate the numerous complaints from students, parents and teachers against the use. He therefore recommends that schools look elsewhere.

    But Pascal Braun and his supporters don't want to know anything about that.

    "The products and platforms you recommended have completely failed," the petition says.

    They demand: "More pragmatism and a sense of proportion in data protection."

    Fifty-fifty situation

    Microsoft or the Stone Age: The courageous commitment of thousands of people for the commercial software of an American provider highlights a problem that has preoccupied students and parents in the country since the beginning of the pandemic and which still does not seem to have been resolved a year later. For some, the Office products are not only the most effective, but still the only means to ensure teaching beyond continuous face-to-face teaching. For others, the software encounters so many data protection concerns that its use cannot be justified - at least not in schools, which have to fulfill a state educational mandate for largely underage students. These would have to be specially protected.According to the data protection officer Brink, these two groups are approximately the same size. In any case, in his daily work he estimates the proportion of opponents and supporters of the software at 50 to 50 - which doesn't make things any easier. It shows the uncertain terrain in which data protection activists are currently moving: They receive a lot of encouragement for their interventions and just as much headwind.

    The state data protection officers themselves also have different points of view: In Berlin, the data protection officer has long viewed Microsoft with suspicion. In Hesse, however, the state data protection agency has just published a "clarification" that only the video function of Microsoft Teams will no longer be tolerated in the future. "Other functions of MS Teams, such as the chat function or the exchange of documents as well as Microsoft 365, can initially be used by schools in the educational area."