Honestly if you’re a caring parent, don’t let your child come near a chromebook.
I can tell you’re not a parent. School systems choose these things without consulting us. Parents don’t have much say in it. There isnt an opt-out.
So by your statement, because I can’t afford to send my kid to private school, I must not be a caring parent.
What about parents who can’t afford it?
What if the parent decided to put Linux on it? Is there any reason why a student can’t just use a web browser to access everything?
Even if that were technically feasible from an interoperability perspective (which in many cases it is not, due to them using proprietary software) a parent putting Linux on it would certainly violate the acceptable use policy when the school inevitably finds out. Consequences from there will vary dramatically, but none are likely to be desirable outcomes. At the very least, they’d probably tell you to either restore the device, or pay for the cost of having their person do it.
Parents don’t generally own these devices and are not going to be legally authorized to install software on them, generally. In the US, for example, unauthorized access along with “damaging” the device by removing the OS could very well be a crime (or several.) I doubt it would be prosecuted, but I personally don’t have money to burn on lawyers.
edit: to be clear, where I live, these systems are typically owned either by the school system, or by a third party leasing agent.
My kids have been using these Chromebooks. I find it hard to believe that this data has any value for Google, unless they’re really want to collect all the wrong answers to the math curriculum for a 6-10 year olds and the essays about favourite names for pet animals. The location data is also useless. The kids are at school at school time.
They should just have offered laptops that don’t exchange data outside the school, because it’s frankly worthless to do in the first place.
Looks like it’s not focused on the student’s schoolwork/personal data but how they use the devices/services.
From the original BleepingComputer article that The Verge article is based on:
The agency clarified that permissible uses of student data include providing the educational services offered by Google Workspace, enhancing the security and reliability of these services, facilitating communication, and fulfilling legal obligations.
Non-permissible cases are purposes related to maintaining and improving Google Workspace for Education, ChromeOS, and the Chrome browser, including measuring performance or developing new features and services for these platforms.
if your IT guy is especially competent, they could’ve built a locked down linux distro to flash onto the chromebooks. that’s basically all chromeOS is.
Most public schools wouldn’t have the budget to allocate a staff member to create and maintain such a distro. It would also take quite some time to flash to all of the devices.
The management tools built into chromeOS are also mature and very compelling to schools. Most schools don’t see the value of reinventing the wheel when a mostly ok solution that takes no extra effort is already available.
that’s also a factor, but having some of these tools developed on a national level could be useful.
I hate chromebooks with the very fiber of my being
Absolutely same. I hate having them in my house, supporting them, and dealing with them when they shit the bed because they’re too underpowered to run a fucking web browser. School systems need to stop buying these goddamn things and stop caving to slimy salespeople selling Chrome plugins for schoolwork.
who knew that an impossibly cheap computer was harvesting your data with a butchered open source operating system with a lot of closed-source stuff added to it?
sounds familiar…
Something that starts with L and can be 100% customized by the school or government for their exact wishes
Think it ends with X. Can’t quite remember.
That’s my point. They’re choosing to use a distro that collects all of this data instead of setting up their own system.
Chromebooks are “cheap” because you pay in part with your data.
Now i don’t know too much about them. But I assume they are BIOS locked or something so you can’t just install your own distro on them?
https://mrchromebox.tech/ you can unlock it
The firmware is locked down with typically either a screw (older devices) or a CR50 security chip (newer devices): https://wiki.mrchromebox.tech/Firmware_Write_Protect#How_Does_Firmware_Write_Protect_Work.3F
The problems with loading a different distro on them would be:
- Cost to go through the process of installing alternate firmware and a new distro on hundreds of devices
- Cost to setup an alternate system to manage/track the devices
- Cost to deal with students who can now more easily re-flash the devices to run other things
- Loss of the fairly extensive management capabilities that ChromeOS provides that allows a school/government to lock the devices down, monitor them, etc
