It has been a media circus in the states this week as reported by the Washington Post.
A school in Philadelphia issues Apple laptops to its students for work, but little did they know that staff at the school had the ability to spy on the laptop’s user.
It was only when a pupil was reprimanded by the deputy head for doing what looked like ‘suspicious behaviour’ that the parents filed a law suit and blew the whole issue wide open. It seems that the student had been watched remotely via the laptop’s webcam, holding up what looked like ‘pills’, but which actually turned out to be a candy bar.
The school came clean to having used the remote watching capability on 42 occasions, but insists it was purely for tracking any missing laptops. The student with the candy begs to differ and the whole thing has turned into a mess.
And so it should be. Who is to say the staff who have access aren’t engaged in redestributing the images or abusing the facility they have to violate the privacy of the user, or worse? The key fact seems to be, that the school never put any of this remote viewing capability in the paperwork supplied with the laptops… so this seems a fairly ‘open and closed’ case from the legal point of view.
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[...] case of the high school student having their privacy invaded by their school’s IT staff (link) highlights the fact the student had no idea their webcam was in use at the [...]
[...] One of the biggest webcam stories of the last few months has been the unsettling news that a Philadelphia school spied on their students using their laptop webcams. You can read our report on the story here. [...]