Remote schooling: Health safety measures shouldn’t put our kids’ privacy at risk.

Amandine Le Pape -

As everyone is taking drastic measures to halt the spread of Covid19, online collaboration is even more of a critical backbone for the world. But should we protect our health at the expense of our privacy?

Moving most of our communications online means that most of our important and private discussions, which in normal times would happen in person, are now stored somewhere on the internet. And how many of you know where and how they are stored?

The lack of control over where our data lives is scary. And while businesses should already be worried about storing their mission critical information in big centralised servers, and doing so in an unencrypted manner - now, it’s our kids we’re talking about!

As schools are closing their doors, they are also doing their best to avoid disruption and looking for the optimal set of tools to be able to keep their mission going. But urgency shouldn’t be an excuse for overlooking the implications of moving online. And as a society, we want to be sure that our kids' profiles are not flying around unencrypted, or stored in big centralised servers, turning into proper honey pots for commercial and malicious interest.

The answer to that is obviously to use fully end-to-end encrypted communications (and no, HTTPS is not enough), and choosing apps which gives your school its own home for these new channels of discussion. Concretely, you want to be able to:

  • Choose in which country it will be deployed
  • Give it the name of your school (and potentially point your own domain at it, for even better security)
  • Brand it
  • Lock down access to the conversations

You may even want to integrate it with an existing authentication system, or other apps.

Our Modular platform will do all this; providing the world’s leading hosting for secure, decentralised communication via Matrix; chosen by Mozilla and many more to power their communication. In a few clicks you can get your own chat and video conferencing platform, branded, on your domain, and most importantly: deployed in your country, under your control. There is no limit on the size you can set up, no limit on the number of users in chat rooms and video conferencing. We’ll work with you to integrate authentication if needed. And even better, we’re offering a 20% discount for educational entities - just ask support@modular.im for the voucher code to use on sign-up.

See you on the safe side :)