A students Blake Robbins & his parents filed a federal lawsuit against his suburban Philadelphia school district, claiming administrators spied on him using a remote-controlled webcam on his school-issued laptop.
His parents, Holly and Michael Robbins said, “I don’t feel that school has the right to put cameras inside the kids’ home, inside their bedrooms and spy on children,”
In a civil complaint filed in federal court by a student side named Blake Robbins, said he received a notice from an assistant principal informing him that “the school district was of the belief that minor plaintiff was engaged in improper behavior in his home, and cited as evidence a photograph from the Webcam.”
Apple Computers is provided to every high school student in the Lower Merion School District, 2,300 in all & the camera is right here. And the lens is able to pick up a wide angle shot of anything directly in front of it.
he district said in a statement that the “security feature was installed to help locate a laptop in the event it was reported lost, missing or stolen so that the laptop could be returned to the student.”
The school says that we use this feature only to locate a lost, stolen or missing laptop, and that they used the feature 42 times to recover 28 laptops over 14 months. But the family insists they never reported the laptop as missing.
The district claims it has “not used the tracking feature or Webcam for any other purpose or in any other manner whatsoever.”
district spokesman Doug Young said that school administration had not informed the Families about webcams amy be activated in their homes without their permission.
Savannah Williams said that she keeps the laptop in her bedroom and says that its on during she is “getting changed, during doing my homework, taking a shower, everything.” She also said she takes it into the bathroom with her to listen to music while showering.
She said “I was shocked,” “everyone is talking about it at school…everyone was really worried about ‘what are they watching me doing.’”
“This is one of the most egregious privacy violations I’ve ever heard of,” said Marc Rotenberg, the director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. ”
On School’s Web site, Lower Merion School District was one of the first districts in the country which issue laptops to all high-school students and that is an extremely big effort to help to bring our students with 21st century. It’s also commendable that the school put some thought into a recovery system to help locate lost and stolen laptops but it’s quite unfortunate that school administrators used a system that enables to take photographs of students using the machines away from school.
The student claims that an assistant principal approached and told him he’d been caught engaging in some kind of “improper behavior” in his home & the laptop’s Webcam had captured an image of the activity in action. Specifically what kind of activity that was hasn’t been disclosed.
Something in this case obviously doesn’t add up. Either someone’s presenting misleading information — intentionally or not — or we’re stuck in a game of semantics as to what exactly went down. Legal proceedings aside, the FBI is now said to be conducting a full criminal investigation to figure out what really happened. If the boy’s side of the story proves to be true, there’s a good chance federal privacy laws could have been violated.
The FBI is investigating a suburban Philadelphia school district accused of secretly activating webcams inside students’ homes