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Comment by magicalist | Hacker News Reader

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 management to monitor every thing a student does on their machine, but it's not a rootkit or something. If it's not the district's device just remove the account.

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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 funding. Deploying it to the device meets these requirements and also extends filtering off site which is a commonly requested feature.

If it is just being managed at the user level - then creating a second account is exactly the way to go.

^ 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.

What law are you referring to? How could a device owned by the student/parent require monitoring while not in school?

Not the device, the student district-managed account that is logging into the device. Districts are bound by law (varying from state to state) at a basic level to filter content and restrict access in the broadest sense, on or off the district network. I've worked in multiple states for various districts they all had similar compliance requirements.

I don't see how the mere fact of someone being logged into a school account could create such a requirement. If I log into the school account from a normal desktop computer, I don't believe that the school even has the ability to restrict what webpages can subsequently be accessed. Is the school then failing to meet its responsibilities? If not, then how could they be required to enforce this on a chromebook that they do not own?

We run Chromebooks. I'm logged into one right now, on my personal account. There is no way for me, the GSuite admin of my company, to fuck with that personal account.

I can't read anything from it, I can't manage it in any way, I can do nothing. Some things in the personal account aren't accessible (you can only have one account on Chromebooks with a Linux VM), that's it.

Not true, and also not possible.

If a kid or parent can log in from offsite, it is not technically possible to force all browsers or systems to monitor and restrict activity. I can log in through Firefox (or curl, for that matter) and not have my activity sent to the school.

Also, there is absolutely no legal way the school could force the monitoring of activity from an offsite computer (unless it were school-owned), even if it were technically possible. To secretly and silently install spyware on a parent's computer when the parent logs into the child's account would violate so many laws and constitutional protections I can't even list them.

The article you recommend for resetting a device itself says:

"If you're using your Chromebook at work or school, you can't reset it."

So it likely does not apply here.

Yeah seconding this both as a parent and someone who has worked in education IT (K12 and higher ed) for almost 15 years. I'm not familiar with GoGuardian but I do recall with certain 3rd party Google apps that did similarly there were ways within the admin console for said app to exclude monitoring devices (regardless if managed account that's logged in) unless they were on the district network(s) by adding CIDR blocks to a whitelist. Of course, if someone were to use the device on a BYOD network in district you could then get scooped up in that dragnet though we excluded even those networks to prevent this as all district devices should be connected to the proper LAN.

I've personally forbade my kids from logging into devices we own with their school accounts (O365). I've also gone so far as to relegate them to only connecting to a segmented guest network (internet only) with their district issued devices. I no longer work for a district but provide various levels of support for districts in my county as a state employee and let me tell you, no one really knows what they're doing. A district I used to work for uses a product called Aristotle essentially logging key strokes of every staff member and student. There are, or were, certain school admins that made it their business disciplining bored-ass students for things 99% of the time they may have said in jest to a fellow student. On the flip side it was instrumental in catching a couple staff members that were doing some pretty heinous things, one of which who is currently serving 35 years on federal charges.

No, it should only be the district's device while the district student's login is being used. There's still very much a legally-enforceable expectation of privacy for the other possible users of the machine.

That the user is the actual owner of the equipment makes it pretty important that someone at the school system defined the MDM policies properly so as not to violate other user's privacy rights. ...but considering the way most of them are staffed, they probably screwed up and need to be shown the right way to do it before they land themselves in court.

Why is it ever the "district's device?" It's owned by the parent, it's being used at home. What justification does the district have to monitor anything that's happening not at school using equipment that they do not own that does not involve any of their servers?

It isn't the district's device. OP just enrolled it in the School's GSuite organization so, obviously, policies got pushed. They can just... not do that.

If they want to log into apps or whatever on the Chromebook, they do need to do that. At that point the device has to follow policies for accessing the school's services or whatever. They still don't own the device, but they can push policy to it. At any time the device can be removed from the organization, but that has to be done by the organization, I believe.

Of course, you can have multiple accounts on the Chromebook, so they could just have the device enrolled for one user, but have a personal account not enrolled.

It's all pretty straightforward.

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