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PHILADELPHIA — A suburban Philadelphia school district used the webcams in school-issued laptops to spy on students at home, potentially catching them and their families in compromising situations, a family claims in a federal lawsuit.
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<p>Unbelievable! How stupid are the people running this Phil school district???</p>
<p>I’m surprised that criminal charges weren’t filed.</p>
<p>I wonder if this assistant principal went to destroy the pictures that he took of students and families. I’m not all that familiar with webcams but a LED lights up on the ones that I have on Windows systems when the camera is active. There may be events logged on the students’ computers in the System Event Log as to when the computers were connected to remotely. I hope that those parents have a forensic computer expert available to go over their system.</p>
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<p>Illegal behavior at school by the assistant principal–not to say downright moronic-- trumps “inappropriate” behavior at home. The assistant principal as peeping tom?</p>
<p>This is the first I’ve heard of this. Let me point out, though, that:</p>
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<li><p>We are talking about Lower Merion School District: certainly the wealthiest, highest-quality school district in Pennsylvania, and probably among the top 10 in the country. Also probably top-10 in lawyers per square foot, including most of the school board.</p></li>
<li><p>These computers BELONG TO THE SCHOOL DISTRICT! They are issued free to the students for school-related use . . . because maybe there are a few students in the district who didn’t already have a laptop, and no one wanted to embarrass them by making them ask for one. How many school districts issue laptops to 100% of high school students? I don’t know, but it can’t be many!</p></li>
<li><p>The district definitely has a concern about use of its laptops to do bad things. I wouldn’t be surprised if there is a set of rules about what the students can and can’t do with them, and that include the district’s right to monitor what the students are doing. I don’t know how activating the webcam plays into that, but there ought to be a connection somewhere.</p></li>
<li><p>Of course, it is supremely creepy to think of an assistant principal somewhere turning on a webcam to watch your kid in his or her bedroom, or wherever the computer happens to be. But I’ll bet it’s nowhere near as cut and dried as this press release makes it out to be. I’m sure the district has – and disclosed – fairly extensive monitoring rights, and I’m sure there is a protocol somewhere for when and how to exercise those rights, and I’m sure someone pretty smart either drafted that protocol or reviewed it for legality, or both. If the assistant principal followed the protocol, and had a decent reason to be concerned, this will not be a walkover for the plaintiffs at all.</p></li>
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<p>School administrators have gone bonkers! Peeping toms now?</p>
<p>Also, see the 12 year old in handcuffs for doodling on her desk in NYC- today on CNN.</p>
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<p>If it’s child porn, it doesn’t matter.</p>
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<p>They could just monitor logs if they wanted to know about improper use.</p>
<p>You need permission to record audio. Someone may have signed something but you’d need everyone present to give permission and that’s clearly unlikely in a family situation. It would be interesting to see if there are any violations of the DMCA here too. My guess is that the best place to examine this would be on SlashDot.</p>
<p>Here is what has been posted on the school district’s website:</p>
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<a href=“http://www.lmsd.org/sections/news/default.php?m=0&t=today&p=lmsd_anno&id=1138[/url]”>http://www.lmsd.org/sections/news/default.php?m=0&t=today&p=lmsd_anno&id=1138</a></p>
<p>I think that the 10th grade student at Lower Merion hasn’t yet taken a good Civics or American History class. The police don’t have a right to go into people’s houses and search without probable cause or conduct a wiretap without a warrant (excepting some peculiar terrorism situations, I gather), and a high school administrator would have even less ability to reach outside the school and do so. Did over-18 siblings of students ever give permission for their photograph or video images to be recorded if they happened to be in a room facing the computer camera? Did parents? Did parents for their other siblings? </p>
<p>If the allegations are true (and that is still an IF at this point) it certainly seems like an even more egregious invasion of privacy than the Rancho Bernardo AP who made girls lift their skirts at the entrance to the dance to prove they weren’t wearing thongs, or the AP who confiscated a kid’s cellphone and then attempted to send texts on it pretending he was the kid who owned the phone in order to try and implicate other kids suspected of using drugs. What is it with AP’s?</p>
<p>It is hitting the news services and a civil rights lawsuit has been filed. Lower Merion School District in Pennsylvania has been sued for a host of statutory and common law violations of privacy arising out of school issued laptops with cameras being used to spy on student activities in the privacy of their own homes. The district issued 1800 Macbooks to high schoolers. A student was brought into the vice principal’s office for disciplinary action based on conduct at home which the school observed by linking to the laptops camera. When the denied the allegations, the vp pulled out a photograph of the student, at home, taken by the camera. Turns out the district has been using the cameras to monitor student activities (and who knows what else) in their homes. Absolutely outrageous. “Zero tolerance” at its best. Do a google search on the school district and the stories will pop up.</p>
<p>Unbelievable! What were they thinking?</p>
<p>I agree - this is outrageous!!! I hope the school officials who came up with this plan will be busted big time!</p>
<p>(When my friend brings her work laptop home, she glues a piece of tape over the camera. Who knows what the management is up to?)</p>
<p>Perhaps once the students get their lawsuit resolved and they own the Lower Merion School District, they’ll do a better job with it. (And you thought Big Brother was the quaint artifact of a bygone era…)</p>
<p>Well, so far it’s reasonably clear that there was no district policy to use the webcams to spy. Whether anyone did it on an unauthorized basis is the question. I hope not. There’s no evidence that anyone did, and the lawsuit doesn’t allege that there is. So . . . it’s a fishing expedition.</p>
<p>The Volokh Conspiracy blog has a lively conversation about this issue going on there.</p>
<p>This is incredulous on several levels. Obviously, it is outrageous that a school would have webcam access to a student in his/her home without the students’ consent or knowledge. </p>
<p>Second, I am continually appalled by schools that feel they have any “jurisdiction” over what students do in the privacy of their homes or during the time the students under their parents’ supervision. For example, while not quite as appalling as this story, I recall in our school district, a student can receive consequences at the school (such as suspensions, not being allowed to participate in an EC, etc.) if they drink at homes or places away from school during non-school hours. Now, this didn’t concern me personally as my kids didn’t drink in high school. I am not condoning teens drinking either. But I feel if a student drinks outside of school events, school premises or school day, and while under their parents’ hours of supervision, then the student should only be in trouble with the parents and/or the law, not the school. But here, privileges at school are lost for that violation outside the school’s time or premises. So, this incident in the news reminds me again of a school who punished a kid for something he did while at home outside the school day and while under the supervision of his parents, not the school’s time. It is an issue in how they obtained the information but it is also an issue to me that the kid was given a consequence for behavior at HOME!</p>
<p>Technically, students have very little protected right to privacy in school. A school can for example search a students locker with very little to no cause, because the locker is the property of the school, even if it has private property belonging to the student in it. The same is true of college dorms (though a bit more strict because college kids are over 18. They can come into your dorm whenever they want but they usually can’t go rifle through the property in it). </p>
<p>Still though, this I think would be insupportable even under the US legal system which grants schools wide powers over the privacy of students. It’s one thing to search a locker, or impose random internet history searches on student laptops for example (a much better way to check for bad behavior) or say that anything stored on the school’s computer is property of the school and can be opened by school officials. That’s reasonable restrictions on the use of school equipment, not much different than what you’d find in the school’s library computers. </p>
<p>It’s a WHOLE other thing to turn on the web cams remotely and spy on students in their homes, listening to their private conversations with their families, or potentially viewing minors in their bedrooms, changing clothes, whatever. There’s probably not a court in the country who will say that was a reasonable way for the school to ensure proper use of its property. And the argument that it was anti-theft is totally bogus. The simple answer to that is to install a relatively cheap tracking device on or inside the body of the computer, or set the computers up so that they can be locked remotely once they are reported stolen. THere is no, no reason to need to activate a camera in order to spy on a thief of your computer, it isn’t going to help you get it back.</p>
<p>My comment doesn’t go to the facts of this case, which remain murky.</p>
<p>What would make me sad to my core is if a significant debate ensues that it would be OK for the school to spy with “its own equipment”. We only have the rights we demand to have in this world and I am not entirely convinced the upcoming generation places any value on the right to privacy or recognizes the lessons of history in the abuses of power that result when privacy rights are trampled.</p>
<p>Call me a cynic, but if the technology exists I have no doubt an audit would show it was abused. Indefensible to me that the technology was installed in the first place. This superintendent should lose his job on that basis alone.</p>
<p>Not defending the school district, but unless they tried to work it out privately with the school district, the parents are jerks also.</p>
<p>If I am an administrator, my response to all such lawsuits is "You are of course within your rights to sue. But please be advised that if you lose, the counselors will be directed to give the following recommendation for colleges:</p>
<p>“This student will graduate from Harriton High School. On advice of counsel, I cannot give any further information.”</p>
<p>“Not defending the school district, but unless they tried to work it out privately with the school district, the parents are jerks also.”</p>
<p>Seriously? What do you think the parents were going to accomplish by themselves? Even if they’d managed to get the remote access removed, the parents would never know that, would never know if the school reinstated it more quietly the second time around, and the school would not be held accountable. Surely you must be joking. It is not a parents job to be policing a school’s illegal activities.</p>
<p>I believe that the parents are just practicing “the best defense is a good offense” by attacking the technology to forestall completely unrelated discipline of their kid. If you take out of the equation the idea that the kid was disciplined based on involuntary webcam surveillance – something that is skillfully not actually alleged in the complaint, as opposed to the press release – you are left with parents suing because the school district had this capacity with no evidence that it has ever been used other than as advertised: to help find laptops reported as lost or stolen.</p>