As others have said, at this point you don’t have a whole lot of choice; you pretty much have to use what the school provides you.

BUT, what you can do is try to rally other students to your cause. You pay the university, which means that students in numbers have influence over how the the university operates. I think your best chance to enact change is to create a petition to get the university to change to a more privacy-friendly alternative, and put together a proposal on how google and microsoft are harmful, and why your proposed alternative is better.

Ohh, I get it!

I recently did a rpi media player project and tried volumio, picoreplayer, moode, and others. I ultimately settled on installing android from konstakang.com. It was so much easier to set up imo for my use case, which was a focus on local music playback and keeping the files sync’d via my LAN. It even supported my hat DAC and my remote control.

Didn’t GoPro start requiring online activation of their cameras a while back? Like customers couldn’t use it out of the box until they installed the smartphone app and activated it?

Edit: Looks like GoPro did try doing it by using dark patterns first and then getting more aggressive.

https://www.reddit.com/r/gopro/comments/16n6xyr/so_you_need_the_gopro_quik_app_to_activate_the/