Google is reportedly threatening schools who wish to disable AI on student Chromebook laptops.
Many ppl warned this would happen when Chromebooks first came out. We were ignored.
This is a leopards eating faces moment.
Short term, there are lots of other search engines; it's easy-peasy to change the default across the entire fleet.
Pure #Linux is the long term solution.
Chromebooks have already been deprecated by Google. Don't get suckered again, schools.
@mattsheffield As a member of the US school system, I hate Chromebooks so much. If you have never used one, it's one of the worst tech experiences imaginable. Even worse than self checkout. Keystroke logging, browser surveillance, (hapara), you can only run chrome, Google workspace, Gmail, plus the school WiFi blocks access to websites. No UblockOrigin 😭. And I can't bring my own computer 😉 because in order to tell if I used AI to write an essay, they need a Google doc log of everything I wrote.
@AnarchistLakeland 100% agree. They are awful, trash devices. No one should use them. They're deliberately crippled spyware.
@mattsheffield @AnarchistLakeland Could be worse^H^H^H^H^Hjust as bad - Microslop is now mandated at the young 'uns' school. It's either corruption or gross incompetence high up in KWETB to foist that shit upon our kids.
@mattsheffield School districts are so easy for tech companies to bilk, and educational institutions don’t really think about how their use of technology enable surveillance of students. Maybe incidents like this will change that.
@MisuseCase Plus, most administrators do not have technology policy backgrounds. They just figure "I like using a Mac," or "Well I like Gmail," and then think it's good for everyone else.
We live in a time when data is the gold. Students should not be starting their lives out already having their data owned by a giant corporation and being locked into its ecosystem.
@mattsheffield Oh that’s the charitable view. The uncharitable view is that school boards and administrators are perpetually in search of One Weird Trick to improve their students’ scores without hiring more teachers or decreasing class sizes.
@MisuseCase That happens. And the worst case surely does as well: They are on the take and get a kickback.
@mattsheffield good day to bury a bad pr move
