Warre n P e tc halonis

School District accused of using a Webcam embedded in a school-issued laptop to covertly photograph a 15-year-old student in his home.
What they said: District laptops do contain a security feature intended to track lost, stolen and missing laptops.

In the beginning of the 200910 school year, Lower Merion School District issued individual Apple Macbook Pro laptop computers to each of its 2,306 high school students.
The laptops were for both in-school and at-home use.

The school district did not tell the parents of the surveillance capabilities of the software, it was kept secret. If the students knew of the TheftTrack software, it would defeat the purpose of it.

Then.
429 pictures were taken, it is said to be more, since the district was unable to uncover the weeks worth of images taken.

These include.

Photos of the boy sleeping Photos of him partially undressed, Photos of his father. Screenshots of Robbins' instant messages Screenshots of video chats with his friends

Reprecussions: The case was brought to court in Robbins v. Lower Merion

School District

The case was settled in favor of Robbins

$610,000

The school district has the ability to track their computers.It is in their own self interest to not tell the students, so they act as if nothing is different

There was little supervision for the IT staff (it was dubbed the Wild West,), with few policies and no manuals. Some could have seen what they were doing as not wrong, since they were not told to not do it. The Director of the program was not forthcoming on information about the tracking technology, probably because he felt it was not needed to be known.

The students privacy was invaded by the school. It is common practice to obtain student permission for any type of picture or video. This is a complete disregard for that practice. Students could be aware of the anti-theft protection and still have a successful laptop program. Philadelphia School district laptops are an example of this.

Children should not be photographed without a parents permission.

The school district overreached its limits by even allowing this to occur. Monitoring in school is different than monitoring out of school.

http://articles.philly.com/2010-10-12/news/24981536_1_laptop-students-districtseveral-million-dollars
http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/pa-school-district-laptopspying-case-settled http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/19/school-accused-of-usingwebcam-to-photograph-student-at-home/?_r=1