The Lower Merion School District today acknowledged that investigators reviewing its controversial laptop tracking program have recovered "a substantial number of webcam photos" and that they expect to soon start notifying parents whose children were photographed.Internal investigation? That's hysterical. I can understand "Nothing you do on a school laptop should ever be considered private" but apparently the webcam software on the laptops was used to regularly photograph people without their knowledge or consent even if they weren't using the laptop at the time.
Responding to a motion filed Thursday as part of a lawsuit brought by the family of a Harriton High School sophomore, School Board President David Ebby said the district's lawyers have proposed enlisting Chief U.S. Magistrate Judge Thomas Rueter to supervise a system by which parents are to be notified and allowed to view the photos.
"We hope to start that process shortly," Ebby said in a statement addressed to parents and guardians and posted on the district's website. "During that process the privacy of all students will be strongly protected."
Ebby's comments came a day after a lawyer for Harriton sophomore Blake Robbins filed a motion in federal court asserting that the system had secretly captured "thousands of images of webcam pictures and screen shots," including photos of students, the Web sites they visited and excerpts of their online chats.
School officials have thus far declined to say how many students were photographed by the system, which was instituted in September 2008 to locate missing or stolen laptops. The district has commissioned an internal investigation and promises to release its results within a few weeks.
That's criminally out of bounds. Who in their right mind thought doing this with the webcam software would ever be considered a good idea? How many other schools...or even workplaces...are instituting the same technology on laptops? Are they abusing it as well?
That's pretty creepy. It also points out if anyone believes privacy still exists in America in 2010, you're sadly mistaken.
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Yanno, I know "Nothing on a school laptop should be considered private", although it really reminds me of the stigmatization of teenage sexuality, which really IS all sorts of bullshit. (Seriously, people, the solution to teenagers experimenting with their sexuality is to help them do it safely, not freak out about the Slutocalypse).
But really, this sounds like an indictment waiting to happen. With terms such as "sexual assault" and "possession of child pornography" being involved.
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