Big Brother Goes to School

February 22nd, 2010. By LucyC

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 by the school district, the webcam will capture anything happening in the room in which the laptop computer is located, regardless of whether the student is sitting at the computer and using it.” No, they are not kidding. 

And—no one was told about this. “Defendants have never disclosed either to the plaintiffs or to the class members that the school district has the ability to capture webcam images from any location in which the personal laptop computer was kept,” the lawsuit states. 

Getting the picture? 

The list of claims against the school district reads like a rap sheet on James Bond—or perhaps more accurately a page from George Orwell’s 1984… “The plaintiffs seek class damages for invasion of privacy, theft of private information, and unlawful interception and access to electronic information, in violation of the Electronic Communication Privacy Act, the Computer Fraud Abuse Act, the Stored Communications Act, the Civil Rights Act, the Fourth Amendment, the Pennsylvania Wiretapping and Electronic Surveillance Act, and Pennsylvania common law.” 

In its defense, the school district’s argument, as I understand it, is that this dual access webcam activation was meant as an antitheft device. But surely somebody should have been made aware of the two way activation? At the very least the parents? 

I can’t help thinking that in light of the relentless demand for ‘real time’ information in the interests of public safety and property crimes prevention, privacy protection is set to become one hot topic, and possibly the reigning in of that old gift horse, also known as Big Brother.

Tags: Online Privacy, Privacy Protection, Webcam

This was posted on Monday, February 22nd, 2010 at 5:30 pm and is filed under Emerging Issues, Internet/E-commerce . Feel free to respond, or trackback. Read our comments policy.