Tools like goguardian give way to some serious security concerns regarding the transfer of unencrypted data over the internet, 24/7 full monitoring of every key pressed, every website acessed, even background processes.

 

All of this brings up a serious question:

Do I actually have rights?

 

Starting from the beginning, ±5 years ago.

And yes, I am going to tell the whole story.

 

 

In 1st grade, everybody went into lockdown for the COVID outbreak. That was a catalyst for unrest and boredom, and a handful of kids started muting or turning off their cameras on the Google Meet calls so that they could go do something else. After a while, the teachers started noticing and would call on people who seemed to be ignoring the class or preoccupied. Some kids would find Chrome extensions and websites that weren't blocked by Cisco Umbrella's blocklists. That was the first block — Cisco. It wasn't much at the time besides mildly annoying, but it was all good and dandy; after all, what's a simple block page going to do?

 

2nd grade hits, we're all still recovering from COVID, and we've got something new on our hands: a small blacklist of extensions and extension types. Essentially, we lost some of the basic games that were easy and fun, such as Doodle Jump or 2048, but life went on.

 

3rd grade. Maybe. I can't remember exactly when, but at some point goguardian was brought into the picture.

 

7th grade, present day. Other jurisdictions are beginning to outlaw the use of these so-called 'security' utilities.

 

Why is that?

Put simply, they lied. My school district, the Bridgewater-Raritan Regional School District, has three main forms of 'security.' GoGuardian, Cisco, and device policies. The main ones are GoGuardian and Cisco.

The internet is a hostile place. I get that. However, the architecture of ChromeOS makes it unwarranted to have any security systems that arent OoTB. Putting that aside for a sec, we reach another hurdle: Cisco's huge security breach.

The way the internet system for my school works is that any device which is currently signed into a school-managed account has a forced setting that essentially makes your DNS traffic go to a Cisco-based DoH endpoint instead of the server you put in on your wifi settings. However, there's a slight problem - It exposes your email address in the process.

Here's a snapshot of the policy mandating this setting, and the setting itself:

 

 

 

Notice how my email is now being sent over the internet constantly (any time a web request is made).

Also, there's some other details in there - such as the DoH salt. How hard is it to guess a salt like that? it's the opposite of salt, which is pepper, followed by my zip code. So, I'm also getting doxxed constantly because people could reverse-engineer the DoH queries to get the salt, in which case they would know where I live.

And don't get me started on the false illusion of control.

It goes something like this: they do all of these things to hold us back; they make us relinquish our rights whilst claiming that it's for our own protection, shove baloney about digital safety down our throughts while leaking our email addresses and zip codes to the open internet. Yet, all they're doing is...nothing?

Think about it: every time they do something to prevent bypassing the blockages, they fuel the fire. Also, they're only harming those who follow rules by making the internet suck. However, those who are constantly looking for bypasses will do just that, evading the restrictions.

This has to end. Thank you for listening to me.