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

Posted by timothy on from the great-and-powerful-oz's-big-lie-technique dept.

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"?

3 of 364 comments (clear)

  1. Re:In-home Reprimand by PRMan · · Score: 0, Troll

    So then why was a student reprimanded for their in home behaviour with a picture from the webcam used as evidence?

    The school claims that this story was made up by the student after being caught with the stolen laptop.

    --
    Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
  2. Re:Enough sensationalism already. by QuantumG · · Score: 0, Troll

    Or so the salivating media told you.

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    How we know is more important than what we know.
  3. The Old Security Excuse by b4upoo · · Score: 0, Troll

    I'm certain that the US would be a great deal more secure if we simply took over Mexico and Canada. Israel always feels more secure when it grabs a mile or ten of Arab soil. So its only natural that a high school would feel more secure if they had a miniature camera on every sheet of toilet paper that a student uses at home. And the list goes on and on and on.