Security question. School issued Dell Chromebook on home wifi??

[little_scrapper]

My kids school issued everyone a Chromebook. They want the kids to have access to wifi at home. I am concerned about the security risk of giving a school issued chromebook, which tracks everything, access to my home network.

Is there any way the school district could use its own spyware to access other computers on my network or access other network traffic? I am a novice on networking and I don't even know what I don't know. Do I need to worry?

I use a very secure encryption password and MAC filtering on my Netgear N600 to keep others off my wifi. But the school wants me to just hand it over via the chromebooks preinstalled spyware/keylogger.

I could let him use the local Xfinity hotspot; if I want to offer up my Comcast login credentials. Nope, same issue.

Whats the story here?

[zanzabar]

the n600 has guest network support, jut make a password protected guest network and it will segregate it. chrome OS for enterprise/education also does not do much tracking even with the tightest restrictions. if they turn on telemetry on it will track app usage, web URLs, file lists (not contents,) and wifi network names/external IPs. you should be fine using the xfinity log in.

if you have an xfinity gate way you could also use the wifi on that and it wont allow access through your n600 since they will be on different networks assuming you have the n600 wan port connected to the gateway.


if you want to be really sneaky with the xfinity wifi, it does not track the password. it takes the mac address and once you long into your account with that device it will link that mac to your account (you can delete it on the website.) so, if you spoof your mac address to the one that the chromebook has, then log into the xfinity wifi on your computer, then despoof your ip it will let the chromebook use the wifi. it works great for game consoles or intergrated devices that dont have a browser that works with the xfinity log in page.