A public school in Philadelphia has been sued by the parents of a student recently disciplined by the school. The reason for the discipline and subsequent lawsuit? The school issues laptops to all students and apparently it’s been using the webcams to monitor the students away from school, like, AT HOME.
The kid who was disciplined was a tenth grade boy they accused of “inappropriate behavior” in his home, an incident that they witnessed while watching him on the webcam. Even better, they didn’t tell any of the students or their parents that they’d be doing this sort of thing, or that they even had the ability to do it. We don’t even want to know what sort of “inappropriate behavior” the teenage boy was engaged in, but we have a few guesses. |PopFi|
Take 2…
Whenever I go to a video site my webcam turns on. Not sure how to turn it off so i always cover it before engaging in inappropriate behaviour. Always afraid it can see back and can send my image to some porn site in china like a reverse backroomcastingcouch.com or something
LM is, actually, a public school.
But it's an easy mistake to make.
@Tim…Thanks. I could swear that one of the news articles I read on it referred to it as a "wealthy prep school." Will correct now.
A totally honest mistake. The school in question's effete and pretentious enough (read, "heads up well-coiffed asses, styled fannies") that it can pass for private. It just gets its money from the poors and richies alike. (Thanks, btw!)
Is this even possible, technologically? There was a great a lil piece a few days ago about the merits of Skype v. Chatroulette. It's crazy to me that it's taken this long for the paranoia about the two-way mirror to set in.
Relative anonymity seems to be the point, to me. The first time I signed on to CR there was a fake(?) hanging and it was really disturbing.
Yes, it is totally possible and the school admitted they used something like this on their decks-
http://www.dragonsteelmods.com/index.php?option=c…
If your school uses Apple Remote Desktop, you can totally observe people. So if you see a kid using Photobooth on ARD, you can 'observe' their deck and see what they are filming themselves doing. I honestly can't imagine that monitoring people at night was a school policy, but some perv with the right permissions 'could' do it.
What I thought might be the most likely scenario-
-Kid uses Photobooth to take sex and/or drug pics to send to his friends
-Kid's macbook has a problem and he brings it to IT
-IT gets it back up and running and sees kid's desktop littered with inappropriate pics.
-IT guy having seen these is obligated to tell principal/admin.
-Principal feels obligated to discuss behavior with kid because in this sometimes confusing world we live in, parent would turn around and blame/sue school for all the 'bad' things their kid has done with a SCHOOL ISSSUED COMPUTER. Precedent exists that the school is at fault because they did not protect/prevent kid from sending nekkid pics of himself to friend who immediately turned around and posted them on Facebook/etc.
-BLAMMO-everyone on Drudge
-post Blammo, school hires a whole bunch of new people.
I can't wait for more info to be released, this is soooooooooo interesting.
I have been involved in this exact scenario, except the pictures the student took were not obscene in any way and the chain of events stopped right there.
Kids said that the iSight light would go on at random intervals and the school said this was a glitch. I can't see how school would be able to do this without opening Photobooth or iMovie, etc on the kids computers. I have no idea how the security software works, cos we don't use it. I just googled that shit up this morning.
Also, please don't demonize Apple Remote Desktop – it has teaching uses like having the whole class watch your screen and also making sure everyone is doing their 'Study Island" etc. lessons instead of playing games etc.
The FBI is now involved and new facts are coming out. see-
http://cbs3.com/local/Lower.Merion.School.2.15065…
Apparently they thought he was a pill head when he was eating Mike and Ike candies-Insert best Scooby Doo Ruh Roh voice here. It looks like they got their info from the ant-theft software.
Now we just need to know whether they were spying or if the camera captured the pics because the deck was reported stolen. I think it is gonna come out that they were spying, which is crazy.
Investigate first why the school issued such laptops to the children. And then, after, know what is heir purpose in "spying" those kids.
Schools have been starting 1 to 1 laptop programs where students are issued a laptop to use in a 24/7 type of way. They are usually trying to prepare kids for the modern world where tech is used in just about every job. They are also trying to engage students in a new way and it works – Instead of your language teacher telling you to go home and repeat a bunch of phrases(which most won't do) they are making movies of themselves doing it and repeating the phrases twice as much, as they want their movie to be good. You can check out the Apple Learning Interchange for more info on what schools are supposed to be doing.
What that school was doing is bad and I can't wait to find out if it was an institutional spying program or an individual gone wrong. PS- I am pretty sure the gov's 'Race To The Top' program will bring these types of laptop programs to many more schools and they are great programs if not abused.