York University has begun the process of migrating faculty and staff email from the Lotus Notes system to Microsoft Office 365 and its "Outlook" platform. Some of our members have indicated concerns about the privacy implications associated with this migration as well as concerns about possible residence of their data in U.S.-based data centres.

YUFA has been told by representatives of the administration that Microsoft will be using Canadian-based data centres for email storage. YUFA has asked that the administration make available the Privacy Impact Statement (PIA) that was completed earlier this year so that our members can review the nature of the declared protections applying to your data after the migration. This statement can be found here.

Please note that, for those who remain concerned about the migration, the policy in the PIA states that "if a faculty member does not wish to move to Office 365 they will be able to move from IBM Notes to 'central email' for their email service."

For more information, please email [email protected] (subject line: PIA).