Chromebooks are far worse than just what Google does to them.
Let us start with GoGuardian, a spyware that school districts, for some reason, deem important. Its most attractive features are the ability to block certain websites, to see what a student is doing, to modify their tabs, to chat remotely to students, and to make pop-up announcements.
More shockingly, at a teacher’s whim, GoGuardian will completely disable a student’s Chromebook, lasting past any class sessions.
GoGuardian’s website blocking feature is constantly abused to block harmless things (often research), and its blocks are easily bypassed. Certain things must be blocked, but an expensive tool like GoGuardian is not warranted for that purpose.
GoGuardian is constantly active, along with Google, watching students’ activities. However, if the school charges fees for Chromebook access (Gateway does), students are right to assume that the device is theirs. They sign into their personal accounts like Twitter (ew) and browse their own interests on their Chromebooks, because it is arguably their device. Schools have no right to monitor students’ personal accounts.
I do not know how much GoGuardian cost Gateway, because my records request was denied.
Gateway’s technology department manually configured Chromebooks to send your location, within 10–15 meters, to every website which requests it—no pop-ups asking you. Unlike your IP address, which usually only reveals your city, this is enough to find you within a house while you are doing your homework.
Gateway has blocked the installation of plugins like uBlock Origin, presumably because it is technically possible to block school-approved websites with it. That is no reason to block it entirely.
Chromebooks are locked down to Chrome OS only.
Screencastify is installed on every Gateway Chromebook, despite Chrome OS having obsoleted it with a “screen capture” feature in the bottom bar. This is now just another point of data leakage.