Big Brother Comes Home

An interesting article on BoingBoing yesterday titled “School used student laptop webcams to spy on them at school and home”. What appears to have happened is this; Laptops were given to students of the Lower Merion School District in Pennsylvania. Those laptops had webcams in the bezel as laptops today normally do. But these laptops were also equipped to allow administrators at the school to observe the environment in which the laptop was at the time of activation. So, be it a home, school, or somewhere between. This led to a child who’s last name is Robbins being disciplined for “improper behavior in his home” by the Vice Principal. I had heard about it, but wanted to make sure some more facts were around, but it is hard to argue with a school disciplining a student and using a photo taken by the webcam of the laptop. I’m not sure in which context this can be framed to make it okay. An interesting discussion can be brought up with the issues of a difficult school culture causing problems so profound you have to police [and I mean it; this is something only a prison should be implementing] the population of the school both locally, and remotely at home for some reason. This brings us to Digital_Nation “life on the virtual frontier”, which makes it okay because you know, they were in a bad situation. Sure. It makes sense. I hope you are detecting the sarcasm. At around the 4:40 mark, you can see how a laptop camera is activated remotely. And it is left on to monitor a person through their webcam. And at the 5:15 minute mark, they say “they have no idea we are even watching” and the guy thinks it is a joke, he laughs, its humorous. To me, it is seriously disturbing. But none of this addresses the issues. The students aren’t doing stuff because they are trying to get away with it, they are doing stuff because life has enabled them to do it. Instead of being taught respect and responsibility, they are being policed like cattle. You really need to watch this video. Any school that has this project will never see my child in class, and definitely will not be using the school software. It is absurd. The internet in all of its glory of transmitting information for learning and discovery has broken down barriers of privacy. When I first used what was to become the internet, privacy was important. People went ballistic when something violated the perception of privacy. Now you have people on Facebook divulging everything about every little aspect of their lives with little care. Then you find out about stuff like this and you have to wonder what people are thinking about in terms of how public their life is, how little control they truly have over their personal information. We’ll see what happens with this lawsuit.