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…
OEM Androids?
I teach technology in Denmark. I am so glad I convinced the school administrators to let me buy a bunch of refurbished Thinkpads and throw Linux on them, instead of being roped into either Google or Microsoft hell like so many other schools. The students seem to enjoy using the machines too (especially after they discovered Minetest).
How is the admin tools and examination mode on Linux?
Good lad. Thinkpads are the best. 👍
I’m sorry about your Danish speech disability though. My condolences.
You just ordered a thousand liters milk.
Minetest is a great platform! You seem like a cool teacher 😉
That’s actually pretty wholesome they found Minetest lol
I am just surprised how this is legal from the start.
It’s called corruption
Yup.
The only weird thing is that Google gets so much for such a low lobbying bill: https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/summary?cycle=2016&id=D000067823
Makes you wonder how much cash they’re shipping to legislators under the table.
I’m always disappointed how cheap our politicians really are. Like $5-10k is enough to get you to sell out your constituents? Yikes, dawg.
That we know of. I think it’s a bit more than that, but yeah, our politicians are cheap.
It’s called old people in charge who don’t understand how modern shit works. Have no understanding of why privacy is worth fighting for.
im tired of pretending they are just innocent old people.
a lot of money has probably gone their way to keep them happy about whatever big tech told them to do.
they have at least an idea of the surveillance state they built since 2001, they are not naive.
Give it a few years in Chromebooks are going to be ecosystems that are filled with advertisements.
So many teachers use ad block and YouTube to teach students things in classes.
YouTube does a really bad job regulating what ads get served to what users.
I think we’ve got a few hilarious PR nightmares looming.
Our district distributes the Chromebooks with ublock origin pre installed.
My district blocks installing uBlock Origin lol
same
they are allowlist (not blacklist) and block nearly every extension
except fire extensions like:
1.) cisco umbrella
2.) epub reader
3.) stop motion thingy
etc etc
My boys have chromebooks, it’s almost mandatory for school now, and I get why teachers need the whole class to have a similar locally-networked tool. Problem is we as parents can’t set anything, as we don’t have ‘developer’ access, and the school controls their accounts. So at home, they do stupid stuff. The hardware is ok, I wish it was just linux. About what google gets - I doubt the current data is so valuable, they play a long game hoping to lock young people into their ecosystem, to profit from people with cash/energy in their 20s.
That’s what Apple did. In the 90s Apple donated a shit ton of original iMacs to my (public but in a wealthy neighborhood) k-12 school. One computer for every three students, and there were computers set up in the library students could use before and after school - and this was during an era that if you had internet at home, a phone call would kick you off, so a lot of people used those iMacs a lot. Many of my former classmates seem to have stuck with the Apple ecosystem as adults.
I hate chromebooks with the very fiber of my being
I needed a laptop basically to use the Internet and office type stuff. $150 plus a new SSD, then replace ChromeOS with Mint and it works great!
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.
google should not be allowed anywhere in healthcare. OR strict restrictions and full tansparency of the company should be required.
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.
Just because you can’t perceive or understand the exploitation being conducted doesn’t mean you’re not being spied on, stolen from, exploited for any and every means possible and your ignorance will feed them further when giving your children as well.
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.
Every time such a thing is attempted, the government officials are bribed by Microsoft to stop the project.
Happened in Munich for example.
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.
That’s also assuming the private schools are any different too, and as if Windows is some holy grail of privacy instead.
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Then please, buy them a normal computer, even used, to play with at least 🙏.
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.
Is there any kind of fee that the parent has to pay for the student to use the laptop?
I thought how it worked was the school told the parents what laptop to buy and then the parents would have to buy it.
What if the parent decided to buy their kid a laptop instead of using the school-provided one?
Yes, because the schools own and manage the hardware they loan out.
Ah. I thought the parents pay for the computers themselves.
What if the parents bought a laptop and refused the school-provided one?
I suppose it depends on the school, I’m sure they all have different policies depending on their IT department.
Doooooooooo iiiiiiittttttttttt
Wonder if this means they’ll also ban Windows and macOS from schools for the same reason.
Poor Datatilsynet, becoming a “sysnet” all through the article.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Danish privacy regulator Datatilsysnet has ruled that cities in Denmark need considerably more assurances about privacy to use Google service that may expose children’s data, reports BleepingComputer.
Municipalities will need to explain by March 1st how they plan to comply with the order to stop transferring data to Google, and won’t be able to do so at all starting August 1st, which could mean phasing out Chromebooks entirely.
Google using it for purposes like performance analytics or feature development is a problem under their interpretations, even if it doesn’t include targeted advertising.
For instance, it’s easy to see how regulators might take issue with student data being used to develop and improve AI features, which are increasingly part of Google Workspace and Chromebooks.
Datatilsysnet says that cities hadn’t actually done a thorough enough job of vetting the risk of using Google Workplace for Education before they approved their use by local schools.
In 2022, it required 53 municipalities to re-do their assessments as a condition for rescinding a previous data-sharing ban for the city of Helsingør.
The original article contains 258 words, the summary contains 176 words. Saved 32%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
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The Verge article got it wrong and used “Datatilsysnet”. The original BleepingComputer article used “Datatilsynet”. Please don’t blame the TLDR bot for The Verge’s mistake when copying someone else’s article.
god i hate using these things for school
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.
ChromeOS is L***x :p
Just the bad estranged cousin nobody talks about.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
If you know you will reconfigure devices. You set up a system to make it easy for yourself.
There are already so many systems one can employ to track devices that doesn’t rely on google.
Non issue. You already have costs for the students current machines when things go wrong, including IT. And you can also BIOS lock the hardware to prevent alternative boot methods. Which will stop most students.
There are PLENTY of other software to externally manage computers.
We’re talking about a government here. They have resources to create it. It’s a high initial cost. Like everything. And then it shifts into maintenance.
Normal companies already do this. It’s nothing new. Just a question of infrastructure.
There’s still a lot of labor costs to reconfigure the Chromebooks into something else. Or to just set up a computer with Linux, even with imaging. ChromeOS is fast to wipe back to a usable state.
True, but it’s another system to setup and manage instead of the one that’s integrated into the ChromeOS tooling.
I’m not sure you can BIOS lock a Chromebook that has been reflashed with one of those alternate firmwares that allow it to boot another OS. I believe they tend to be all about freedom and not restricting the user.
Governments, especially education, can be quite underfunded. I am doubtful they will be able to set up the same level of monitoring and management at a similar cost, even if that cost is high initially and lower over time.
The danish government is not underfunded.
It’s a a question of will and wants. They don’t HAVE to buy chromebooks. They can buy hardware like everyone else. It’s a government so they probably have to open it up for all suppliersto bid. But it can still be done.
And a lot of the cost will go back into their people and create jobs.
And price isn’t even the main question. It’s the fact that Googles data collection on students might make their chromebooks illegal to use.
Doesn’t matter if it’s free. It’s not legal.
