Depends on how non-Orwellian you want. Low end wintel laptops(some said to be surprisingly endurable, even edging into ‘competent’) cost about the same as all but the lowest-end Chromebooks; and offer more choice in browsers; but obviously default to phoning home to Redmond.
Your real problem is that it’s pretty difficult to touch the internet significantly without getting most of what the guy in this story objects to, regardless of platform. ChromeOS doesn’t actually do much that Chrome doesn’t do when run on any other OS; and if your plan involves being logged into gmail all the time, even a third party browser can only save you from so much.
So, no, not really(though you also can’t really get an expensive computer that is non-orwellian if you plan to interact with the internet too much, it’s not a hardware cost problem).
Oh completely, I might be in the minority here, but I like it when I get targeted ads rather than generic ones. I’ve brought camping stuff for a trip that I hadn’t considered I needed to buy before it popped up in an ad (water carrier - I normally use a camelback style reservoir when hiking, but this was going car camping at a site instead). At the moment I’m getting a lot of car leasing ones, because I’ve been looking at car leasing. It’s better for me compared to seeing something random (I don’t know, Donald Trump ads if they’re running in the US), it’s better for the car leasing company compared to just hoping that it coincidentally gets seen by someone interested in leasing a car.
A company’s clients are defined by if they use their services, not if they pay them money for using their services. Offsetting costs for one set with the income from another doesn’t suddenly mean that the first set aren’t clients, even if it reduces the cost to zero. If Google doesn’t maintain a good perceived benefit with it’s user clients, they stop using it, and then it loses perceived value with its advertising clients.
I mean, think about this like AOL, other old portal ISPs or mail providers used to be. You paid to get access to the portal, AOL’s tools and the internet, but they also charged for adverts on their portal. Users and advertisers were both clients. AOL’s total income is the amount it gets from both combined. Only difference with Google is that they’ve built their balance of income in a way that means they don’t need to charge most of their users most of the time.
And that’s where we might be looking at this differently, I don’t think Google can afford to give us their service for free, rather, I see it as an investment on their part.
If they were giving us their services for free, I would find it horrifying that they would harvest my personal data for financial gain, but if they give me a service in exchange for that data, I still think I’m being ripped off, but its much closer to a fair trade.
There’s no doubt that this arrangement has benefits for everybody, but google ads sells eyeballs, and those are our eyeballs they’re selling.
Agreed. While I agree with the EFF’s recommendations - my browsers are set to wipe everything when they close - I’m more concerned about the people who issue the computers than I am about Google.
We’ve read stories about spyware on school-issued computers (at least if we’ve read BB), so the first rule is not to trust any work- or school- (but especially school-) issued computer, Chromebook or otherwise. Use it when needed for official business, then put it somewhere safe… for you, i.e. out of camera and microphone range.
Actually, I’m fond of taping over camera lenses. I just wish microphones were so easy to deal with.
So, I guess the argument is that the sequence of steps needed to take to “ensure” privacy aren’t actually hellish/exasperating/a persistent annoyance, after all. (I’m preserving the hyperbole because, yes, once you have a certain amount of stress going, being asked to re-enter passwords can indeed become hellish.)
But I think to arrive there you literally have to ignore or dismiss the experiences of everyone else directed to use the steps who are parents or children, both of whom have plenty of competing demands on their attention. To then be told that this is actually:
rather blithely misses the point. If it’s annoying, then it can be easily and immediately be compromised. Developing it as a habit is going to be difficult to inculcate. (And then any relaxed standard of discipline is likely to ruin the habit).
So I don’t think this is even overstated: [quote=“codinghorror, post:13, topic:70079”]
The web is one thing, but good luck policing that black-box smartphone app ecosystem that you accidentally drove kids into, EFF
[/quote]
Ignoring this really doesn’t help. Privacy is pretty confusing, but its chief issue is … how did someone else put this somewhere else … the cognitive overhead (?) it represents many parents and kids are likely to regard as an unnecessary hassle to start with.
Such as:
Because who wouldn’t love entering that, right?
So how can this be fixed? I don’t know. I’m not a privacy expert. But I don’t have to be a chef to know the soup doesn’t taste right.
Have you ever had to deal with a crew of people who are always “100% sure” that they remember their passwords, and yet have problems every day? Pasting an ASCII string is much easier.
As I understand it, Google’s IP is that, basically, they know stuff that makes targeted ads possible and so valuable. They cannot afford to let that stuff leak or they don’t have a business.
On the other hand if the Government spies on me and collects data, and it then leaks or is misused, they can simply write a law that makes it OK, with no consequences.
So Google is safer than the Government in this regard.
Facebook is trying to do something similar but with non-anonymised data. It stores a vast amount of information about every user, and also about people who are not even signed up as users but who are tracked by cookies, and which it attempts to identify in photos using facial recognition. And its security record is not perhaps stellar.
If you don’t allow your kids to use Facebook, Whatsapp and the like then you may well be in a position to ask the school board what steps are being taken to protect privacy without inconsistency (though you may not get very articulate answers.) But if you do, perhaps you should be putting your own house in order.
“Our results show that the participants performed the best with
the physical keyboard. This was expected since the physical
keyboard provides rich multisensory feedback and is most
familiar to touch typists. With the physical keyboard, the
participants typed with the highest speed (WPM), the lowest
KSPC, and the lowest error rate (uncorrected, corrected, and total
error rates). It is also clear that haptic keyclick feedback and
auditory beep sound feedback improved the typing performance,
as compared to the none (no haptic nor auditory feedback)
condition.”
The difference in error rates is particularly significant.
That’s fine, so far as I am concerned. The public at large need not be inconvenienced based upon Google’s presumption that their business is somehow necessary. This is the reasoning fail of businesses generally - no, it doesn’t objectively matter if anybody uses your service!
No legal consequences. This does not prevent people from acting against them anyway.
That should only be expected if things don’t change, nothing gets leaked, everyone plays by the rules & no secondary tracking DB’s get created to link multiple accounts thereby skirting all the rules.
…because of there is one thing I have learned from Western Capitalism its that corporations always play by the rules.
Normally, I’d agree with the helicopter parenting label. However, school districts in California have made a deal with the devil to receive these devices via grants. Moreover, the new state tests can only be taken electronically, which is advantageous because questions are multiple choice, short answers, and short essay). Finally, the curriculum incorporates publisher material that is accessed online AND forces students to have a gmail account to send screen shots and assignments to their teacher.
When I posed a question regarding how ethical this is, I was thought of as a dinosaur.
All work will be paperless in schools. And this will save them money. Bravo. But Google is all over the place in your children’s school and they can track EVERYTHING they do. I think it’s unfair that there is zero digital privacy in the K-12 (okay, 3rd-12) world. Especially when we teachers are supposed to protect their privacy.
OMG. Do you know house hard it is and how long it takes to get students to remember how to use the correct login and password? Even after two months? Super easy ones? I’m not talking about the technologically savvy kid, who comes from middle or upper class. I’m talking about the ELL kid whose family doesn’t own a computer OR whose experience with computers is limited to facebook. I shudder to think what might happen if they had to remember ASCII strings.
(Before you say that they should write them down, remember we ask them to write down stuff all the time and they don’t. They all want to take out their phones and take pictures of everthing! And they still forget to do their HW. )
The chromebook is primarily used for accessing cloud services, which can give away information by virtue of being under the control of third parties. An ipad can run more local applications so it doesn’t suffer from this same potential for information leakage, but by telling students that they must buy a particular make and model of tablet computer, the school is (IMHO) unfairly advantaging a particular manufacturer of computers (apple).
So there are two different downsides here: privacy in cloud services, and being forced to use a DRM laden tablet computers. Personally out of the two I would prefer the chromebook, which at least gives the user a choice of cloud services to use.
From around year nine my son will be able to use his own device for school. I think that is a better way to go.
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