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Big Brother Goes to School

February 22nd, 2010. By LucyC

webcam Big Brother Goes to School As webcams become an increasingly common tool used for public safety and crime prevention, the irony appears to be that those doing the watching are the ones that need to be watched most, as a class action lawsuit filed last week so clearly illustrates.

The federal lawsuit was filed by the parents of a fifteen-year old boy who was told by an assistant principal at the school he attends that he “was engaged in improper behavior in his home, and cited as evidence a photograph from the webcam embedded in minor plaintiff’s personal laptop issued by the school district,” Courthouse news reported last week. How on earth did this assistant principal know that? And who is he to decide what is improper behavior in the youth’s home?

What happened? The answer is pretty creepy. The Lower Merion School District in Pennsylvania issued laptops with webcams to 1800 high school students as part of an initiative to “enhance opportunities for ongoing collaboration, and ensure that all students have 24/7 access to school based resources and the ability to seamlessly work on projects and research at school and at home.” What’s that expression—never look a gift horse in the mouth? Read on.

As it turns out, it wasn’t just the students that had 24/7 access to the laptops and ‘interconnectivity’. The webcams could be remotely activated by the school authorities at any time they chose, enabling them to “view and capture whatever images were in front of the webcam, all without the knowledge, permission or authorization of any persons then and there using the laptop computer,” the lawsuit reportedly states.

Wait—there’s more. “Additionally, by virtue of the fact that the webcam can be remotely activated at any time Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Online Privacy, Privacy Protection, Webcam
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