Your privacy at high school is not a game

Hello,

At high school, you spend many hours doing assignments, sending emails, and organizing tasks. Much of your academic and personal life happens through screens. But have you ever wondered who controls the digital footprint of everything you do?

Lately, the Department of Education and school administrations have been imposing corporate tools (like Microsoft 365) and centralized data management systems. They will tell you it is for convenience, but behind those decisions lie implications that directly affect your future.

The danger of mass tracking and privatization

Until now, a system called GestIB was used, which already carried the risk of centralizing too much information in a single place. In fact, in July 2024, GestIB suffered a serious hack that illegally exposed the data of thousands of students and families in the Balearic Islands [1.2.1]. The transition to the new system (Llull) does not fix this risk; instead, it worsens it by adding unnecessary links to the chain and further closing its source code, making it harder for anyone to audit it to find security flaws. Furthermore, since it is being programmed by an external company, these are data that a private company has access to right from the start.

• Your permanent 'digital shadow': These systems record disciplinary reports, absences, or school counseling records. By centralizing everything in a large database, a permanent profile of your teenage years is created, over which you have no control. Today, no one can guarantee that this data is safe. Recent precedents such as the one in the United States (where the Trump administration unified massive federal databases and handed them over to Palantir without anyone's permission) show that, no matter how much privacy is a fundamental right on paper, once your data enters a centralized system, actual security ceases to exist.
• Private access: Since the development of Llull is in the hands of an external company (Ayesa), your academic and personal record structurally becomes information to which a private company has access, with no public transparency regarding the code that controls this access.

Black boxes vs. Real technology

The mandatory use of closed ecosystems like Microsoft turns you into a mere passive user of a "black box". You are only taught to click the buttons they choose, while they extract your data to train their artificial intelligence systems.

If you are interested in computer science, programming, or technical development, you know that the real potential lies in open source and free software. That is what makes technology attractive:

• Depth of learning: Free software allows you to open the hood, inspect the code, compile, modify, and understand how things work from the inside. All the actual infrastructure of the internet (servers, supercomputers, the web) runs on open systems, not on Microsoft office suites.
• Sovereignty and control: Learning with open source gives you the power to build your own systems and own your tools, instead of limiting yourself to being a captive customer paying for lifetime licenses.

What can you and your class do?

• Ask your technology teachers: Request a debate on digital sovereignty. Most computer science teachers would rather teach you how the real world of open systems works than train you to use a closed commercial suite.
• Bring it to student representative meetings: Propose that students demand their personal files not be managed through private tools without a public audit. You have a right to know who is accessing your information.