Written by Prof. Rom Feria

I have been openly critical of the use of Facebook by teachers and school/college/university administrators, not to mention the Department of Education and the Commission on Higher Education. Whilst the reasons against the use of Facebook is pretty much overwhelming (data privacy, mental health, misinformation/fake news, among others), one popular reason in favor of Facebook, at least in the Philippines, is the cost of access — thanks to the Facebook-Smart and Facebook-Globe deals of providing free access to Facebook, Philippines telcos are complicit in Filipinos’ data privacy violations by a foreign company. There will come a day when a lawyer files a class suit against these two telcos for the violation of the Data Privacy Act by subjecting Filipinos to data collection without consent — this will be a landmark case with global coverage (Yeah, I can dream, can’t I?).

It took a pandemic for these two telcos, Smart and Globe, to realize that zero-rating, i.e., providing access for free, Google Suite for Education and Microsoft Office 365 Education is the right thing to do. Depending on the telco, students can purchase a special prepaid kit, and purchase load for data, and with it comes free access to these educational sites!

Most schools, colleges and universities have either Google Suite for Education or Microsoft Office 365 Education, or both (the University of the Philippines has both). Providing all students and teachers with email accounts is a no brainer! Since all students and teachers have email, and that access is free, disseminating announcements, whether from the school administrators, or announcements for specific classes, no longer requires posting it on Facebook — where students are subjected to distracting entries on their timelines, online bullying, or fake news and other algorithmic manipulations done by Facebook.

One may think about the privacy implications of using these services from Google and Microsoft, but I leave that to your institution’s data protection officer (DPO) to evaluate and do a privacy impact assessment (PIA). And if it is any consolation, for education, both companies have some commitments on privacy different from their consumer offerings.

Smart and Globe should extend this zero-rating to cover all edu.ph domains (even just for text, like the old WAP-sites, for those of you who are old enough to know) to further protect our students from harm by foreign companies, whose business model is surveillance, data collection, manipulation and privacy invasion. Smart and Globe can provide caching services for schools’ websites so traffic will remain within their data centers. At the end of the day, as long as students are protected against the abuses of Facebook, it is a win for all.