Digital cloud services and higher education: the quest for data autonomy

Universities are increasingly dependent on cloud-based data infrastructure and services. They have been migrating ‘their local data’ now for more than a decade. We need a profound discussion about this paradigmatic shift, which heavily affects the autonomy of students, staff, and higher education as such. AI-based inferences might deprive students and institutions of fundamental choices, the data generated with public money is volatile for extraction by powerful actors and there is a lack of exit-strategies.