Practical consequence to comply: throw away all them Chromebooks. Because one thing a Chromebook will not do is refrain from sending personal data to Google.
Or better: convert them into Linux machines. But I doubt whoever went with Chromebooks in the first place has the resources or the knowledge to do this: why would they have chosen to buy Chromebooks otherwise?
chromebook’s are incredibly easy to manage from an I.T. perspective, and they are cheap to replace and repair. that’s why they are popular
Indeed. And all that goodness is on purpose: Chromebooks are Google’s trojan horse into your private data.
All Google products are designed to be as attractive and popular as possible so people are drawn to them like flies to a turd and give Google their data. That’s why Google axes so many projects that aren’t quite attractive and popular enough.
I know the word is overused now, but this is basically endhittification step one.
And considering it’s Google, I’m not sure there need to be any other steps. They are luring people in as young as they can, establishing patterns with them (using Google services and Google software as soon as possible) and basically guaranteeing customers / surveillance targets for life
Ironic, given they were spying for the US
Google! - the best spying engine the world has ever seen - collaborating with the 3 letter agencies.
Whoever is in charge of this:
Nextcloud is a very solid cloud solution which doesn’t suffer from those data leaks. https://nextcloud.com/
You do not have to sell the chromebooks, you can replace the OS with fedora. You can customize your OS acording to your needs with ublue https://universal-blue.org/
I applaud your optimism that there are enough people employed in the school IT to do that properly.
Don’t get me wrong, you are absolutely right with those statements, but the schools used Chromebooks for a reason I would think, the same reason that if they had not used Chromebooks it would be some Windows installation.
It is what people know, it is “easy” to work with and so on. Those are obviously not great reasons and not 100% true, but that is what counts for those schools.
I am very curious what they are going to replace this with and I am unfortunately 100% sure it is going to be Windows and the Onedrive/Outlook ecosystem.
Many government organizations in Sweden use Nextcloud for exactly this reason.
Thats great and commendable. But the fact is the schools do not have that running, else they would not need the Chromebooks in the first place, would they? They still have to get this started which means employing and paying someone to do this, having budget for paying the servers and whatnot. Seeing how efficient governmental work is, it won’t be as easy as borrowing some server capacity from a different government agency plus one of their IT guys for a short while.
