💻 Enrolled Chromebooks and Personal Accounts

[dbugden]

Hi Everyone,

We have had a query from a parent and I'm having a little bit of trouble tracking down the answer.

We have just gone with BYOD Chromebooks across many of our schools this year. We are enrolling each student's chromebook as they bring them in. We have had one question/concern from a parent – Students use their school org account when at school, however they are free to use their own gmail account on their device when at home.

One parent has expressed concerns about their child logging into the managed chromebook using their personal gmail outside of school hours, as they do not want the school to have access and visibility over their personal data. Just wondering if there is any validity in their concern, and whether them signing into their personal account on a managed school Chromebook does actually give the school any access to their personal account?

Thanks everyone,

Dave

[MarkLoundy]

It depends on your school’s policies, but our response would be that school devices are for school purposes only and that students are not permitted to use them with personal accounts. Your legal counsel might concur for legal reasons. 

[panderson]

I would think that the school wouldn't have much visibility into the personal account because is not managed by the district.  The only way that I could think of that might give the school access is if they have (or if there even is) some kind of device extension that logs everything done on the Chromebook, as the district would only be managing the device.  The only policies that would be effective without a domain user login would be the policies applied to the device, which could restrict what they could actually do on the device based on your settings, but no user settings would be applied or available. 

[tneuser]

I don't believe you can monitor personal accounts even on managed devices. The only thing you may be able to see is when they log into their personal accounts. It also depends on what you have for network monitoring. But in terms of seeing emails and personal account info I don't believe you would be able to see any of that. My question for you though is why are you enrolling student devices into your domain if they are personal student devices? As long as students are using their school accounts, you can do most things through their school account. What are you doing that you need to manage their devices?

[MarkLoundy]

Referring back to my previous reply… Your legal counsel might consider your school liable for anything done with the device — even on personal accounts. Talk to them before replying to the parents. 

[panderson]

Good point!  It's probably not a good idea for a school to manage devices that they don't own. That's pretty much the reason that we don't allow BYOD.

[Kim_Nilsson]

You can't monitor activities of the non-managed (personal) account.

You can absolutely monitor hardware activities of the device, but that doesn't include web activities. Battery status, wifi IP addresses (which does reveal rough location), most recent boot.

And, NO, you can't install Chrome extensions to a Chromebook, only to managed users/sessions, which this isn't.