None of this shit works - Captain James T. Kirk
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No evidence that school spied on students
IN A PREDICTABLE 'well they would say that, wouldn't they' situation, a school's lawyers have declared that its staff had not used webcams to spy on students in their homes.
The lawyers are defending Philadelphia's Harriton High School against a privacy lawsuit filed by 15-year old pupil Blake Robbins' parents. The family alleges privacy violations over a laptop camera that was remotely activated to take images of the boy at home without their knowledge.
The school's law firm Ballard Spahr declared the institution innocent at a recent board meeting, according to the Associated Press, because the cameras were only activated to find missing laptops. However the law firm's report to the board admitted that lax policies saw 58,000 images of students taken, of which 210 were snapped by Robbins' laptop from October 20 to November 4 along with 218 screen shots.
Ballard Spahr said the mass collection of images stemmed not from an effort to spy on students but from "the district's failure to implement policies, procedures and record keeping requirements and the overzealous and questionable use of technology by IS personnel without any apparent regard for privacy considerations or sufficient consultation with administrators."
The report also said that the school had not been forthcoming with its board, administrators and pupils about what the laptop's Thefttrack function could do and how they used it.
However for the school those Robbins related images were deemed "troubling" and its Vice Principal Lindy Matsko decided it was "appropriate to discuss" them with the teenager. He alleges that she warned him that school officials, based on the webcam photos, suspected Robbins of flogging drugs. Robbins then explained that Matsko had mistaken Mike & Ike sweeties for prescription pills.
School officials claim that they used Robbins' laptop's webcam originally because they were trying to retrieve the computer due to outstanding insurance fees. Quite why they thought that they needed to do this when they saw Robbins every day at school is anyone's guess. µ
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"Spying" -- such a tawdry word. Let's just call it 58,000 pictures accidentally taken. Doesn't that make everyone feel better?
Use the old pen and paper, no privacy issues, no pedophiles issues, etc.
Laptops for 15 year old kids, it's a bad idea. Electronics devices like phones, pads and laptops are distracting in a classroom.
People should understand, computers are a tool only, not a miracle to solve all the problems. Not all tasks could be done with a computer.
The School was not forthcoming with the board, the administrators, and the students.
Can't trust that damned brick & mortar no how.
"To be shore them southies done it, your guv'nor, but we think they'd be objurgated by staying after the class, writing lines and bang the erasers!"
There really is no nice way to put it, this school district screwed the pooch, all this report is doing is trying to downplay the activities and reduce the damages paid out.
The simple fact in this case is that the school turned on the snoop system without prior notice or consent, failed to turn it off after they realized that the laptop wasnt stolen, then used images obtained from the laptop of the student in his home, and tried to discipline the kid for what they thought to be illegal activities.
This fails the legal test miserably, it cant even pass the straight face test. every law enforcement agency in the US would have been required to have a search warrant in order to set up any kind of in home surveillance, especially surveillance of a minor.
The assistant principal of that high school needs to be banished from the education system for being fucking stupid, seriously, someone who lacks basic common sense yet thinks they have the authority to just ignore the law, and use the kind of tactics as this dumb bitch did has no business being anywhere near the education system.
The true tragedy in this case will be the fact that in the end nobody will face criminal charges, sending a signal to all other education systems in the country that if you have enough money to cover the civil lawsuits, you can do whatever you like...
...or cocks, or similar birds.
That is the real story behind it, as reported elsewhere.
I spose they might not be southerners in the true sense of whatever that war was that Lincoln guy pushed but in my defence, they are south of me. :)
Really? Geography much?
grasp that your own system may be used to spy on *you*? Any with a webcam *may* be so used by remote control; if built into the OS or a trusted program, it won't be caught by anti-virus check, either. (And are your *sure* that your process list *really* shows you what M$ doesn't want hidden?)
In any case, this is at best prototype of the two-way telescreens of "1984".
Unless the students lawyer is a dunderhead like the schools lawyers, the school looks to be in trouble. If this were poker, this is where the student would say "all in".