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Several sites are reporting that Windows 10 telemetry and the invasiveness of Office 365's monitoring mean that schools in the German state of Hesse have been banned from using it. The decision was handed down by the Hesse Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information (HBDI — Hessische Beauftragte für Datenschutz und die Informationsfreiheit.) The ban also applies to many other "cloud" services for the same reasons, so Google Docs and Apple's hosted services are banned as well in the same move.
The issue is not solely with hosted services in and of themselves but with the data collection carried out by the services and the question of consent for that with minors. The issue of coerced consent is not raised yet in that context. For the time being, standalone solutions like LibreOffice or Calligra would solve the problem and, many would say, be significantly better all around.
[There used to be a datacenter in Germany — the Deutschland-Cloud — on which the German student data was stored, but that was closed in August 2018. That data was migrated, and new data is now stored, on a European data center that can be accessed by US officials upon request. --Ed.]
9to5Mac: Office 365 banned from German schools, Google Docs and iWork also ruled out
CNet: Microsoft Office 365 banned in some schools over privacy concerns
The Verge: German state bans Office 365 in schools, citing privacy concerns
The Next Web: German schools ban Microsoft Office 365 amid privacy concerns
Original Decision: Stellungnahme des Hessischen Beauftragten für Datenschutz und Informationsfreiheit zum Einsatz von Microsoft Office 365 in hessischen Schulen
(Score: 4, Informative) by nobu_the_bard on Tuesday July 16 2019, @09:15PM
Or, like Office 365 - the security options for the cloud environment are a SEPARATE LICENSE available to enterprise or premium accounts. Your ability to restrict access is fairly limited without it. You can't, for example, block someone in a foreign country from installing Office on your license without owning a security license to allow enforcement. You can't block logins to your account from IP address without a security license. You can't turn off (most) of the login protocols without the security license. Even with the security license, some styles of login are not covered by the GUI apparently, I haven't dug far into that yet.
Also, some of these features only work properly in Edge. A few options don't appear in other browsers at all ("we recommend a compatible browser").
You can do some of this with Powershell, connecting directly to Office 365, but there's no cmdlets for most of those functions.
When you turn on security options like country blocking, I haven't found a good way to show if it is actually doing anything, either. This might be on me though, I haven't had time to read all of the audit options just yet.
It's crazy. Nothing simple with Office 365. The company management likes the information on how users are making use of the programs though as (one source of) indirect measures of what is actually useful and who is making effective use of their assigned resources...