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...

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).

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.

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.

I hate chromebooks with the very fiber of my being

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.

Honestly if you're a caring parent, don't let your child come near a chromebook.

Wonder if this means they'll also ban Windows and macOS from schools for the same reason.

Doooooooooo iiiiiiittttttttttt

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!

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.