Google stores every piece of data in three centers randomly chosen from the many it operates worldwide in order to guard the company’s ability to recover lost information — but that also makes the data subject to the vagaries of foreign laws and governments, Fischer said. He added that Google was not willing to provide ITS with a list of countries to which the University’s data could be sent, but only a list of about 15 countries to which the data would not be sent.

“Yale is an international, multicultural community of scholars,” he said. “Students deserve to have rights to their information while on campus.”

I was a user of the old system and it was by no means perfect (or even comparable to Google Apps) as a grade student there years ago.

However, it is good to see Yale pondering the larger issues before leaping over the edge.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out (I’m guessing Yale will eventually switch over the Summer).