Student email accounts will be switched from the outdated Mirapoint system to Gmail next year, but users concerned with potential security risks will be given a choice to switch to the system used by university employees, the Student Email Committee announced last night.
After several months of discussion and gathering student input, the faculty and student committee determined Gmail, overwhelmingly favored among students, was the best option for the university’s student email system. The system will maintain its umd.edu branded identifier.
Committee members said the alternative — an account under the Microsoft Exchange program that faculty and staff use — would also be available to students who are concerned about their emails being subject to data mining. These concerns, which were discussed with students at a town hall forum earlier this month, did little to dissuade the student body from supporting a switch to Gmail.
“At the end, it was the students’ input which led to the decision to outsource to Gmail,” interim Vice President and Chief Information Officer Joseph JaJa wrote in an email to The Diamondback last night. “I strongly support the committee’s recommendations.”
Elizabeth Moran, a student representative on the committee who also serves as a business school legislator in the Student Government Association, said the final decision came down to how best to appease all parties — those who wanted Gmail and those who raised concerns about privacy and security.
“I’ve heard everything from, ‘I might want to run for president in 25 years, and I don’t want my information floating around in a cloud somewhere’ to ‘I’m working on government projects while I’m here,'” Moran said. “So I see this as the best of both worlds.”
Graduate Student Government physics representative Tomek Kott, who also sits on the committee, said having the secondary option is especially gratifying for graduate students, who may deal with research that requires a higher level of security and privacy than Gmail can provide.
Office of Information Technology manager David Barks noted the university will be working to ensure that the Gmail accounts, which will serve the majority of the student body, are as secure as possible.
“Security and privacy are of paramount concern, however we feel we can mitigate the risks with a solid contract and strong privacy and security policies and Google is willing to work with us on this,” he wrote in an email to The Diamondback yesterday.
OIT has already begun to implement the switch to ensure that accounts on the Gmail host will be ready and available to incoming freshmen when they arrive at orientation in July and August, JaJa wrote.
“They’ve got a lot of work ahead of them,” Moran said. “Now we just get to sit back and wait, and we come back in the fall, it will be ready for us.”
villanueva at umdbk dot com
