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Did school spy on student? FBI investigating

February 23, 2010 By Anne 1 Comment

A Philadelphia-area family has filed a lawsuit against their child’s school district for spying on students using Webcams on a school-supplied laptops inside students’ homes, and the FBI is investigating, the Washington Post reports. “The FBI will explore whether Lower Merion School District officials broke any federal wiretap or computer-intrusion laws.” The district supplies laptops to all 2,300 students at its two high schools, the Post added. At CNET, ConnectSafely’s Larry Magid blogged that the remote Webcam monitoring (which the district said is now disabled) was a security measure activated only by the district’s security and technology department when a laptop had been reported missing or stolen. “The tracking-security feature was limited to taking a still image of the operator and the operator’s screen,” Magid reported. The Post article says the district has acknowledged that Webcams had been activated “42 times in the past 14 months,” and the activations had helped the school find 18 of the 42 missing computers. But the issue that led to the lawsuit so far doesn’t seem to be theft-related. “According to the suit, Harriton vice principal Lindy Matsko told Blake on Nov. 11 that the school [one of the district’s two high schools] thought he was ‘engaged in improper behavior in his home.’ She allegedly cited as evidence a photograph ’embedded’ in his school-issued laptop,” according to the Post. This is pretty chilling behavior on the part of school officials. “The case shows how even well-intentioned plans can go awry if officials fail to understand the technology and its potential consequences,” the Post cites privacy experts as saying. Compromising images from inside a student’s bedroom could fall into the hands of rogue school staff or otherwise be spread across the Internet, they said.” For anyone worried about being watched remotely through their Webcam, here’s some clarity in another piece by Larry Magid at CNET.

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Filed Under: Risk & Safety, School & Tech, school policy, Social Media, video, webcams Tagged With: FBI, Harriton High School, Philadelphia

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  1. Follow-up to PA ’school spying’ story | NetFamilyNews.org says:
    October 22, 2010 at 1:15 pm

    […] the district isn’t using the laptop tracking software anymore. For more on this, see “Did school spy on student? FBI investigating” and “The school district that logged 13,000 photos of students’ homes.” // […]

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IMPORTANT RESOURCES

Our (DIGITAL) PARENTING BASICS: Safety + Social
NAMLE, the National Association for Media Literacy Education
CASEL.org & the 5 core social-emotional competencies of SEL
Center for Democracy & Technology
Center for Innovative Public Health Research
Childnet International
Committee for Children
Congressional Internet Caucus Academy
ConnectSafely.org
Control Shift: a pivotal book for Internet safety
Crimes Against Children Research Center
Crisis Textline
Cyber Civil Rights Initiative's Revenge Porn Crisis Line
Cyberwise.org
danah boyd's blog and book about networked youth
Disconnected, Carrie James's book on digital ethics
FOSI.org's Good Digital Parenting
The research of Global Kids Online
The Good Project at Harvard's School of Education
If you watch nothing else: "Parenting in a Digital Age" TED Talk by Prof. Sonia Livingstone
The International Bullying Prevention Association
Let Grow Foundation
Making Caring Common
Raising Digital Natives, author Devorah Heitner's site
Renee Hobbs at the Media Education Lab
MediaSmarts.ca
The New Media Literacies
Report of the Aspen Task Force on Learning & the Internet and our guide to Creating Trusted Learning Environments
The Ruler Approach to social-emotional learning (Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence)
Sources of Strength
"Young & Online: Perspectives on life in a digital age" from young people in 26 countries (via UNICEF)
"Youth Safety on a Living Internet": 2010 report of the Online Safety & Technology Working Group (and my post about it)

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