Ever Feel Like Someone Was Watching You??

In the battle for proper uses of technology, it seems a certain school district has crossed the line recently. The Lower Merion School District, in the suburbs of Philadelphia, has allegedly been spying on its students in their own homes via the student’s webcams. The school district provided their students with free Macbooks and, when the insurance was not paid by the parents, they activated the theft-tracking system secretly lodged in student’s computers. According to lawyers, the school system allegedly had thousands of pictures of hundreds of students. This all begs the question: what the hell was the Lower Merion School District thinking?

The system that Lower Merion school officials used to track lost and stolen laptops wound up secretly capturing thousands of images, including photographs of students in their homes, Web sites they visited, and excerpts of their online chats, says a new motion filed in a suit against the district.

Back at district offices, employees with access to the images marveled at the tracking software. It was like a window into “a little LMSD soap opera,” a staffer is quoted as saying in an e-mail to Carol Cafiero, the administrator running the program. “I know, I love it,” she is quoted as having replied.

Except that these computers were not stolen. The school district says it turned on the cameras in these kid’s computers because their families had not paid the $55 insurance fee and the kids were not authorized to take the laptops home.

Well, then why weren't there phone calls to the kids parents saying “we need the laptops back until you can pay for the insurance?”

If this software was solely to track missing computers, once they knew where it was, why keep taking pictures? And those two quotes above make it plain that 'tracking stolen laptops' may have been the excuse, but it's bullshit: they enjoyed peeking in on these kids and kept doing it.

Regardless, it only goes to show that this situation is rapidly unraveling for school district officials. While many parents of students at in the Lower Merion school district are surprisingly supportive of the administration and have urged the Robbins family to drop the lawsuit, I cannot help but wonder if their opinions will change once some are shown photos of their own children in various stages of life–and undress, for that matter–in their own bedrooms within their own homes.

Thousands of images. Multiple students. School district officials gossiping about the access as though it were their own twisted version of “All My Children.” It’s shaping up to be a very interesting summer for the folks in Lower Merion.