Asus Chromebook

[BackwoodsBob]

I was helping someone set up a chromebook and I notice it has a cavernous 32 gb of storage and it occurs to me that everything from your favorite photos to documents and everything else you keep on a computer gets stored on the cloud thereby negating the need for a big hard drive. Seems innovative except...About 12 years ago when I was studying for my Bachelor degree there was a program out called drop box which was totally free to use. But if you read the ToS, anything you upload became theirs. Proprietary or not. Is this still the way these cloud services work?
Now it is terribly cool that it is so thin and light, but I would be afraid to look at it wrong for fear of damaging it with my clumsy mits.
Last, in the bottom right corner where the time is, there are these tiny little pop up windows I thought it is a browser extension, so I turned them all off. All of them keep track of what you do anyway, which probably has to do with cloud services and saving your work on occasion but still...
Is there a way to turn these tiny little annoyances off permanently? Without disabling half the thing?? I read that if you click on the tiny little icon you can tell it not to show you this again, problem is, they pop up every few minutes.

 

[newtekie1]

But if you read the ToS, anything you upload became theirs. Proprietary or not. Is this still the way these cloud services work?

It is obviously going to vary from service to service. However, I don't believe that is how Google's cloud is structured. What you store in their cloud services is still your data, but I'm sure they do put something in there about them no being responsible for the data and how they are allowed to access that data when legally required(like if they get a subpoena).

 

[DeathtoGnomes]

You could install Tinywall to prevent these things from accessing the internet, but it doesnt stop them from collecting data and saving it until they can connect.

Is there a way to turn these tiny little annoyances off permanently? Without disabling half the thing??

Another fine example of a product (OS here) made by a company that sells personal information for profit.

 

[BackwoodsBob]

So none of you extra smart computer guys know how to disabe the tiny little pop ups on a brand new chromebook? Now I am in trubble...

 

[DeathtoGnomes]

Not familiar with ChromeOS ( for good reason), so I can only guess at stuff.

What does the startup program list look like? Maybe its from a background task.

 

[BackwoodsBob]

Not familiar with ChromeOS ( for good reason), so I can only guess at stuff.

What does the startup program list look like? Maybe its from a background task.

there isn't one. Literally, you turn it on and wait 10 seconds and you are at the desktop.

 

[newtekie1]

Did you try disabling notifications?

Settings > Site Settings > Notifications

Then set everything to block and select the option to not allow sites to ask to send notifications.