PA School Defends Web-Cam Spying As Security Measure, Denies Misuse

tekgoblin writes "The Lower Merion School District of Pennsylvania was recently accused of privacy invasion. Now the school has released an official response to the allegations. According to the school, the security feature was installed in the laptops as an anti-theft device and was not intended to invade privacy. The software that was installed would take a photo of the person using the laptop after it was stolen to give to the authorities. Now this may be what it was intended for, but it seems that someone didn't get the memo." The district's claim that it "has not used the tracking feature or web cam for any other purpose or in any other manner whatsoever" doesn't square with the allegations which set off this whole storm. And if there was nothing wrong with it, why does the school say it won't start using the snooping feature again without "express written notification to all students and families"?

Comments

Re:In-home Reprimand

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

And furthermore, WTF is their problem with masturbation?

What are you talking about?

The kid wasn't choking kojak - he was eating candy.
Dumbass on the other side of the camera thought a piece of Mike & Ike candy was an illegal drug.
Who knows what kind 'zero-tolerance' befuddled mindset lets them decide that something that looks like a pill was "illegal" via just a webcam shot...

Re:In-home Reprimand

[TheWanderingHermit]

It wasn't masturbation. I can't remember if it was in an article linked to by /. or from Google news, but the student involved was eating candy that they mistook for drugs. I can't remember the name of the candy, but it looked close enough to capsule or caplet form that the school people just assumed (intentional use of that word) that it was illegal drugs.

I hope the student ends up able to retire on the punitive damages he gets. While it's not the best for him, it'd make the school district and others think about it more. They won't ever see this based on ethics, but they might make changes based on fear of damage awards.

Re:Enough sensationalism already.

[Shadow of Eternity]

You must be new here. School's are FAMOUS for long strings of abysmally unintelligent decisions. Hell, the most recent SCotUS case involved a stripsearch conducted by multiple adults because one student with a bad disciplinary record got caught with advil in a folder that had been loaned to her by another student at least several days before.