Chromebook for Young students
At pre-Teen age, kids are being forced to identify themselves to the Google ecosystem with their real names, setting up Gmail accounts (which is what Google Apps email is) and basically subjecting them to early profiling before they even join social media. Their photos are being placed in their Google login.
All this because a Chromebook is in reality just a dedicated Chrome Browser. You cannot alter it to use something other than Chrome. All your app use has to be cloud based since you cannot load any software on the Chromebook directly.
This makes for easy maintenance for the school and easy training but the school administrators do not think about the security and privacy implications of bringing in kids into the Internet willy-nilly.
Aside from creating a public profile of the kid in Google before they are even 14, with potential exposure to facial recognition tech, and also a potential issue with COPPA (Child Online Privacy Protection Act), people don't realize that Google doesn't give these services away for free without some return. They read and scour all the emails and control the search results just like any other user. And we willingly introduced our kids to the loss of privacy at such an early age.
Next, Chrome, and by inference Chromebook, has a very intense location tracking capability that is very hard for a kid to turn off. This means that websites focused on kid content (like ones often used for school projects like Indian Tribe research) can be used by a website owner with bad intent to lure kids into a website and get their exact location (within 6 feet).
The Internet is a dangerous place for young people. I can't imagine the thought process of these school administrators who understand nothing about the technologies and are unaware of the introduction of kids to these dangers.
At pre-Teen age, kids are being forced to identify themselves to the Google ecosystem with their real names, setting up Gmail accounts (which is what Google Apps email is) and basically subjecting them to early profiling before they even join social media. Their photos are being placed in their Google login.
All this because a Chromebook is in reality just a dedicated Chrome Browser. You cannot alter it to use something other than Chrome. All your app use has to be cloud based since you cannot load any software on the Chromebook directly.
This makes for easy maintenance for the school and easy training but the school administrators do not think about the security and privacy implications of bringing in kids into the Internet willy-nilly.
Aside from creating a public profile of the kid in Google before they are even 14, with potential exposure to facial recognition tech, and also a potential issue with COPPA (Child Online Privacy Protection Act), people don't realize that Google doesn't give these services away for free without some return. They read and scour all the emails and control the search results just like any other user. And we willingly introduced our kids to the loss of privacy at such an early age.
Next, Chrome, and by inference Chromebook, has a very intense location tracking capability that is very hard for a kid to turn off. This means that websites focused on kid content (like ones often used for school projects like Indian Tribe research) can be used by a website owner with bad intent to lure kids into a website and get their exact location (within 6 feet).
The Internet is a dangerous place for young people. I can't imagine the thought process of these school administrators who understand nothing about the technologies and are unaware of the introduction of kids to these dangers.
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