According to the Philadelphia Daily News, the school issues notebook systems to all of the students. If I were one of them, I’d return the computer, disable the camera or disable the spying software.
What the hell was the “improper behavior”?!
But someone set up the laptops so the cameras could be remotely controlled.
Or are they going to claim the one administrator obtained software to do this and somehow installed it on a district system?
No need to do anything that drastic. A bit of electrical tape over the webcam lens works just as well.
Wow. I’m not one to jump on the latest RO bandwagon, but WOW. It’s like they distilled all the stupid out of everyone who’s ever been banned here and put it in charge of a school.
I hope the administrators involved will be prohibited from even looking at a school for the rest of their lives. This was the mother of all boneheaded decisions. I read the legal complaint and I’m very curious to find out what the school system’s defense will be.
Is there actually a school policy stating you’re not allowed to beat your pud in your own home?
Probably spying on someone. We can’t have our students doing that now!
I doubt it was approved, board-sanctioned spying. My guess would be one or two idiot administrators. In any case, those responsible should lose their credentialing if this turns out to be true.
As to the software issue - there may be a legitimate use for remotely-activated cameras. I just can’t think of one right now.
I agree with you. It’s a related issue, though.
Not necessarily buried, so much as couched in obscure legalese without specifically mentioning remote control of the webcam.
That sounds totally implausible to me. Schools do things by committee, and it would take more than one person to come up with this idea, get the software, authorize the spending, and monitor the images.
Man, to think we thought the school was staffed by wannabe-fascists in my day. If it’s all what it sounds like, this is beyond the pale, and from the school’s point of view, spying on the kids was not only incredibly inappropriate and invasive, it’s monumentally stupid. If this is true they’ll be sued into the ground.
This is the part that made me laugh. The administrator(s) picked the worst possible place to try a stunt like this with any chance of getting away with it.
Suppose that one of those webcams caught an underaged student in a suggestive pose. Given the strict liability imposed for possession of child pornography, does that mean that the principal, the superintendent and the board of the school district are now liable to being treated as sex offenders? I don’t understand how any of them could have thought it was a good idea.
Whoa now. That seems a little bit extreme, don’t you think?
People don’t get banned here for this kind of behavior.
:eek:
Truly, you have to wonder what’s passing their mind when someone thinks ‘remotely spying on students at home with webcams’ is a good idea. And how someone that dumb manages to remember to breathe.
I was watching a PBS program online last night with something slightly similar that struck me as perfectly appropriate. A vice-principal was remotely spot checking school-issued laptops during class time; he checked to see that programs open on the screen were schoolwork related and not goofing off on facebook. That’s the kind of monitoring I would expect on school-issued laptops
It’s easy to set it up so the entire computer can be remotely controlled. Maybe all the computers were set up this way and some bone head administrator thought it would be a good idea to activate the camera.
This sounds insane, but I’d like to wait and see more evidence that it actually occurred the way the complaint alleges it did. I can easily imagine it eventually coming out that the picture, whatever it was, was actually obtained by other means (e.g., the student taking it himself and showing it to friends who then proceeded to share it in turn, getting out of hand).
How could they even hope to monitor that many students outside of school hours; or, to put it another way, how much money did they blow on paying the people who did the spying?
The school couldn’t hope to watch them all, all the time. If there’s any truth to this story, I suspect they had some sort of trigger built in so that someone was notified and the camera activated if the student surfed to an unapproved website.
I’m not really all that surprised. Look at the other thread here in the Pit about spying on kids, and all the people defending their right to search their kids, their rooms, read their diaries and in general treat kids like inmates in prison. Given that schools act as more-or-less secondary parents, I find it quite believable that the same kind of people who say they have a right to read their kid’s diary would feel they have a right to spy on their students with a webcam. One attitude is a pretty straightfoward extension of the other.
Link to PDF of class-action lawsuit filed.
Just another data point on the continuum we’ve been setting up for decades. Check out the documentary The War on Kids. Link goes to a review and interview with the creator, link to website for the movie itself in the article. Fascinating, disturbing, horrifying. Readily available to those who know how.
ETA: The filing asserts that no information/releases given to parents acknowledged the presence of remote web cam access.