How would you feel it a laptop on the desk in your daughter’s room suddenly "woke up" and the webcam in it started staring at her while she moved around in private? And if the person on the other end of that sneaky webcam was her high school principal, that situation would go far beyond being "just wrong". It would be seriously creepy!
Well that is what quite a few parents in a suburb of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania say has been going on for while and they want it stopped! Of course, the school is denying everything and claiming they are pure as the driven snow on this matter. But they are not denying that software was installed that could turn on a webcam and "spy" on a student who had borrowed a laptop from the school. This software was capable of being activated without the knowledge or permission of the student or her family. And there are lawsuits flying around The Lower Merion School District because of this scandal.
This is a case where it doesn’t matter how much the school comes up with excuse after excuse, using this kind of smarmy technology spying on kids is enough to give parents or anyone the creeps. The school administrators are full of explanations that the software was there to make it possible to turn on the webcams on laptops that were stolen.
What, are you going to have the laptop stare around the inside of the trunk of a car and tell you where it is? Um, there is this little thing called GPS tracking that would do that without installing software to give you the ability to play peek-a-boo with students without them knowing it!
At the same time that the school is yelling that they never used the laptops webcams to spy on students, one student was called on the carpet because of a webcam photo taken from a spy laptop that supposedly shows him taking drugs. It turns on the student was just enjoying an innocent piece of candy. But the laptop wanted to be a little snitch and catch the student doing something wrong in private and then giving the school the drop on the kid.
Even if the kid was a major drug dealer, (which he wasn’t) and even if the software was there to find stolen laptops, just putting the remote webcam activation software on the machines is enough to have parents running to the courts to have this kind of thing stopped and those responsible dragged over the coals. If they can take pictures of a teenage boy eating candy, who knows what other pictures schools could get of your kids in the privacy of their bedrooms. So while the school is yelling how innocent they are, its good this hit the fan like it did because there is no excuse and no reason under the sun that makes this kind of creepy spying on children in any way ok.