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Fortunately all of the security problems you mentioned also make it extremely easy for the students to compromise the machines and install a clean OS. The high

Fortunately all of the security problems you mentioned also make it extremely easy for the students to compromise the machines and install a clean OS. The high school I went to (about 5 years ago) had a laptop program, and every year when laptops were given out to the new students one of the senior students would go around and teach everyone how to wipe them. Administration obviously weren't particularly keen on this, but what are they going to do, suspend the entire school? Confiscate over a thousand laptops every week to re-install their spyware? You just need to get buy-in from enough of the students to make any retaliation implausible. I think this process was a lot easier at the school I attended as it was a very tech-focused institution to begin with, but kids are only getting more and more technologically-minded as time goes on, so getting that buy-in should be doable.

63 5y ago
Convenient security holes are harder when the spyware is built into the OS. The popularity of Chromebooks means most students don't have the option you're describing. You can't disable the analytics without disabling school control over the whole OS and then you lose the school wifi password and your machine is useless anyway. What's worse is in a particular district I used to work for, this was the only device the kids had, hence why the school needed to hand them out in the first place. So suddenly the school and Google see all the personal browsing data of every student. Obviously there's no malicious intent so nothing bad has come of it yet presumably, but it is unsettling.
closeparen 5y ago
In general MDM provisions both the spyware and the configurations/client certificates necessary for internal resources. With some effort you might manage to unbundle the two. But just wiping the machine and freeing it from MDM only nets you a normal off-the-shelf machine. You aren't getting at privileged resources with it anymore.

63 5y ago

Convenient security holes are harder when the spyware is built into the OS. The popularity of Chromebooks means most students don't have the option you're describing. You can't disable the analytics without disabling school control over the whole OS and then you lose the school wifi password and your machine is useless anyway. What's worse is in a particular district I used to work for, this was the only device the kids had, hence why the school needed to hand them out in the first place. So suddenly the school and Google see all the personal browsing data of every student. Obviously there's no malicious intent so nothing bad has come of it yet presumably, but it is unsettling.

closeparen 5y ago

In general MDM provisions both the spyware and the configurations/client certificates necessary for internal resources. With some effort you might manage to unbundle the two. But just wiping the machine and freeing it from MDM only nets you a normal off-the-shelf machine. You aren't getting at privileged resources with it anymore.