Is my school allowed to spy on kids through school chromebooks?

Answer 1

Schools can monitor activity on school-issued Chromebooks, but there are limits to what they can legally and ethically do. It’s not exactly “spying,” but more like supervised monitoring, often for safety and educational purposes.

Answer 2

Spy, no. Monitor, yes. It's semantics, I know, but schools and school districts are responsible for all traffic on their servers. Additionally, they are more accountable if they issued the device to students. Besides, provided you are using it for the intended purpose, you have nothing to hide and nothing to fear.

Answer 3

Yes, they can monitor you and it is perfectly legal.

Your school owns the Chromebooks. You signed a declaration stating that you will use them appropriately for study.

The school can monitor your use of the devices to ensure you are not violating the agreement between student and school. They will also need to make sure you're not doing anything illegal with school property, such as streaming torrents.

Similarly, a business has the right to monitor the computers of their employees in the office, because the business owns the computers and will need to tell if employees are wasting company time or money.

It may also be part of a social study for the advancement of science. In social studies, people need to be monitored behind their backs and will only be told they were monitored after the study. If you tell them before the study is finished then the results of the study will be useless.