My son came home with a Chromebook and I'm trying my hardest to make him hate it by talking as much shit about it every chance I get. I made sure to get him a desktop with games, dual boot windows and ubuntu and stress that if there's anything he wants to do, we can do it.
Tell HN: My kid's school installed spyware and I can't remove it
271–280 of 442 posts
Re: Tell HN: My kid's school installed spyware and I can't remove it
#272> I bought him a Chromebook for schoolwork, but also for other private things. When we logged in... This is why you need to pay attention to the technology choices that you make, and that your schools make. Chromebooks are designed from the ground up to be locked-down dystopian spyware once you "log in" to them with a specific Google account. For heaven's sake stop buying any more Chromebooks. The correct solution he…
The Chicago Public Schools is an immense agency. Good luck getting anyone to pay attention, even at a school board meeting.
And referring for prosecution is really going to go nowhere.
Best bet, contact the public service operation for one of the TV stations, maybe a newspaper, and maybe your city council member, to wake up somebody, either at your school or at headquarters downtown.
Prepare to be disappointed.
Re: Tell HN: My kid's school installed spyware and I can't remove it
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Following this advice and using a tone that even resembles the tone of the comment or the original post will make you look/sound crazy. Thank you. Also, please ignore every comment in this thread suggesting you lawyer up or go to small claims court. The laptop isn't ruined and can be reset whenever the OP wants (as they already established). If you go in guns blazing to the school board, the school is going to go i…
> If you go in guns blazing to the school board, the school is going to go into full defensive mode. Once you've established yourself as the aggressive parent with an axe to grind, they're not going to be interested at all in working with you. Too bad! They can be voted out, or face lawsuits if a heated attitude is too much for them that they feel the need to ignore valid feedback regardless of the emotions involved.…
They can't be voted out by you alone though. And what he wrote about the school is just as true for the majority of other parents.
Re: Tell HN: My kid's school installed spyware and I can't remove it
#274Don't use Google products. Google makes its money based on user surveillance.
Re: Tell HN: My kid's school installed spyware and I can't remove it
#275Re: Tell HN: My kid's school installed spyware and I can't remove it
#276> I did a full factory reset, signed in to his account again, and now the system is once again locked down. That’s by design though isn’t it? You logged in with a managed account and the policy was applied again? The account is his school account right? That’s pretty much how Chrome OS works. This might just be a good lesson that you want to maintain device / role boundaries.
> That’s pretty much how Chrome OS works. And that's the problem. Signing onto a remote account is a request to access a remote resource, and should not be interpreted as granted the remote actor control over local resources. That Chrome OS works this way implies that Chrome OS is fundamentally flawed.
It is not fundamentally flawed, it just isn't a general purpose computer. It's a thin client to your cloud services. The "local" is not a primary compute environment, but just a cache. Once you think about it this way, Chromebooks are absolutely amazing little physical manifestations of a remotely managed browser. As they are intended to be.
Re: Tell HN: My kid's school installed spyware and I can't remove it
#277Should the school not be providing the chromebook for your child to use?
Re: Tell HN: My kid's school installed spyware and I can't remove it
#278My son came home with a Chromebook and I'm trying my hardest to make him hate it by talking as much shit about it every chance I get. I made sure to get him a desktop with games, dual boot windows and ubuntu and stress that if there's anything he wants to do, we can do it.
Since he is basically going to have a Chromebook for the rest of his school career, and likely part of his professional life, why not help him to understand it and set him up to be successful?
Even if you have a personal dislike for something, your job is to enable your son to be prepared for his life ahead.
Re: Tell HN: My kid's school installed spyware and I can't remove it
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Call into the school's board meeting during public comment, and make it loud and clear that the school is installing spyware on students' Chromebooks. Share your technical credentials and the method by which you found this. Just some comments on the political aspect of this, since the HN crowd tends to not be so good at that part: - Following this advice and using a tone that even resembles the tone of the comment…
I agree one hundred percent with this commenter. They are absolutely right – don't use the tone that I'm using on HN! I did not structure my HN comment from the point of view of how to present it for public comment; and the tone if used verbatim will mark you down as "tinfoil hat crazy person who we should ignore", as the parent correctly points out. Definitely don't use the term "spyware". Try to assume the persona…
Even better, contact other parents ahead of time and see if others are concerned. Expand your group of concerned people by following their natural networks and start collaborating on a joint proposal.
Ideally you can collectively find a workaround (start by emailing IT, as someone else suggested, if that doesn't work, maybe schedule a meeting with someone more influential -- either way, the aggregate wisdom of your parent group will come up with more creative solutions than us at HN). Once you have a solution, craft a flyer and send to all parents: "This is what we saw as a problem, and this is what we did about it. Contact us if you want help."
If all else fails, stand up together in the board meeting.
Democracy does not require permission.
Re: Tell HN: My kid's school installed spyware and I can't remove it
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
This response should be higher instead of the useless armchair lawyering :) With GoGuardian, though, I think device level management is common? It's BYOD but it essentially becomes the district's device (and all the other accounts disabled) until you remove the managed account. It can't happen by accident, though, it tells you very clearly you're making it a managed device. It sucks that schools are using enterprise…
I think GoGuardian is normally full device, but on Chromebooks it is installed via extensions. Extensions in on Chromebooks are 'user' policies so they are applied to entire OUs of users. (docs here for anyone who is interested : https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/6177431?hl=en#zip... ) These types of solutions are really common for schools because under CIPA you must filter your network to receive e-rate fun…
^ This guy is correct. OP is vastly overstating the situation or uninformed.
Unless it was school provided hardware, management is done at the account level and accounts are fully isolated.
Powerwash (https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/183084?hl=en) the device, login with a personal account to make it the primary, and then login with your kids school account. Yes they will be monitored when logged in to the school account, but that is for compliance with the law. If you don't like it, write your representative.