Spycams also violated third-party rights.

[woo me with science]

http://www.philly.com/inquirer/currents/20100425_Head_Strong__Web_cam_violated_third-party_rights.html

By Michael Smerconish - Inquirer
Inquirer Currents Columnist

"I saw the infamous "Mike and Ike" photo - the picture of Harriton High School sophomore Blake Robbins that launched the Lower Merion School District Web-camera debacle. And at the invitation of Robbins' attorney, Mark Haltzman, I also reviewed additional pictures captured by Robbins' school-issued computer. The lawsuit filed by Haltzman over the photos and Robbins' right to privacy appears ripe for settlement. But overlooked in much of the analysis of this case was a large group of victims of privacy invasion - those with whom Robbins was communicating online.... Most shocking were the ones showing the faces or worded Internet postings of individuals with whom Robbins was communicating.......What gave Lower Merion the right to invade the privacy of these people?

Their images represent a gross violation of privacy akin to listening in on a private telephone communication between two individuals, at least one of whom has absolutely no idea of the presence of an interloper. That's the real outrage in this case, how the privacy of innocent third parties - classmates, friends, family members, and parents - was compromised.

.....

Who gave Lower Merion the right to intrude on those communications? Regardless of whether Blake Robbins stole a computer (there appears to be no evidence that he did), whether he is a problem student, whether he missed a required insurance payment, whether his parents owe Peco money, or any of the other Main Line buzz that has surrounded this case, it was inexcusable for the school district to invade the privacy of third parties en route to violating that of Blake Robbins.

......

One radio listener asked me to distinguish this case from one in which a school maintains the prerogative to search a student's locker. I could easily do so. A locker is on school property, and it doesn't function like a predator drone in a student's bedroom.

A different listener had a better analogy. What if Comcast did what Lower Merion did? What if someone was delinquent with a cable payment or lost a cable box, and Comcast threw a switch and took a peek at what was going on in front of that box sitting on top of your TV? There would be hell to pay, and appropriately so.

....."

[Angry Dragon]

1. K&R

[RandomThoughts]

2. I actually thought for awhile, covert spying on people

would be easiest by putting a camera in a TV or cable box, since they are hooked up to an outgoing line.


Just another reason to own the part, but you can't worry about that stuff, most of it just creates paranoia. You would end up like Gene Hackman's character at the end of 'The Conversation'.

[woo me with science]

15. You can't worry, but you must remain vigilant. nt

[csziggy]

18. At some point when digital TV conversion was in the works

I had a whacko tell me it was being done so the government could put cameras in our TVs and spy on us. He was completely seriously paranoid about it. What got me worried - he was a guard at the local jail and worked FOR the government.

[varelse]

3. K&R

[PCIntern]

4. "I Love It!"

Much as I don't like Smerconish...he's right on the money here...

[woo me with science]

6. What really bothers me in all the news reporting on this...

is that I have not seen any serious attempt by reporters to identify how many districts are doing this, who they are, and how they are handling privacy concerns.

This *cannot* be an isolated problem. Lots of school districts provide laptops, and even here at DU, proud2BlibKansan wrote happily that her district has the same capability to activate student webcams.

Where is the media in investigating this? Why is nobody bothering to look into how widespread this problem may be?

[TorchTheWitch]

13. Asst. Principal at school in the Bronx clearly likes to snoop on students

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vza_bMuy42M

Granted, he's snooping while they're in school, but are these kids allowed to take their laptops home? If so, what's to stop him from snooping at them at home? He clearly gets a kick out of spying on them in class... being able to spy on them at home is far too much of a temptation.

I did find one article that discussed a wider problem, but it took some doing in finding one...

http://www.examiner.com/x-39447-LA-Computers-Examiner~y2010m3d3-Harriton-High-School-webcam-spying-not-an-isolated-occurrence?cid=channel-rss-Gadgets_and_Tech&utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Empowered+Brand+Builder%2C+Inc.&utm_term=Scott+Jay+Ringle

[woo me with science]

14. That article really only mentions one other school,

and it doesn't even try to answer any questions about the real scope of the problem.

I spent some time looking, too, and you're right...It is hard to find even a mention of a wider problem. Every once in awhile a reporter will include a passing comment about other districts' doing this, but none of them seem to realize that THEY are the ones who should be asking these questions:

How many and which school districts are using the cameras?
How are they being used?
How many students are affected?
What notifications are being used?
What privacy policies are in place?
Do the notification rules and privacy policies differ across schools? How?
How are notification rules and privacy policies developed?
How are they enforced?
What other complaints have been made at other schools?
etc...

Who, What, When, Where, Why, for pete's sake.

These are all important questions that have factual answers and that good reporters should be asking.

They are acting as though Lower Merion is an isolated incident, and this could not be happening anywhere else.

[TorchTheWitch]

19. I know what you mean and it's surely odd

Even the one article I could find spends more time on how great it is that these kids had laptops then the issue of a wider spying problem. I was rather disgusted by that.

Once again, journalists not doing their job. I can see where the local media for Lower Merion would concentrate more on the one case, but why in the world is the wider issued going totally ignored? Surely there are now people all over the country whose kids have laptops from their schools who are wondering if the same thing is happening to them and virtually no one is talking about it.

[pipi_k]

5. I don't know a whole lot about how it all works so...

with regards to this statement:


What if Comcast did what Lower Merion did? What if someone was delinquent with a cable payment or lost a cable box, and Comcast threw a switch and took a peek at what was going on in front of that box sitting on top of your TV?

Don't cable companies have the ability to just disable the box if there's a delinquent payment or it's been stolen? And would it have been possible for the same thing (remote disabling) to be applied to those laptops given to the kids? Instead of spying on them, I mean. And maybe have some kind of remote tracking that doesn't even involve getting images of who's using the computers.

If such technology exists (and again, I have no idea whether it does or not), why wouldn't the school take advantage of it if those computers were all that important to them?

That school district seems to have gotten itself in a shitload of unnecessary trouble by being so stupid.

[hobbit709]

7. Tracking can be done without pictures.

Even the school district there admits that. No real reason to take pictures

[TorchTheWitch]

11. pictures don't do anything to identify where the laptop is or who has it

unless you're lucky enough to have it stolen by someone who you recognize and know where they are. It's the most stupid useless theft tracking/recovery device anyone could come up with.

[pipi_k]

12. Yeah, that was one of my first thoughts in all of this

similar to what happened one time when my purse was stolen at work and the thief/thieves tried almost immediately to use my ATM card but put the wrong PIN in three times and my card was confiscated.

I contacted the Police Dept to try and get the ATM booth footage of the person(s) trying to use it. They apparently thought it wasn't that big a deal and I never did hear from them, but then I realized, what the hell...if I didn't recognize the photo, what good would it do anyway?

What really hurt about the whole thing was that in my wallet was the ONLY photo I had of the daughter I lost nearly 20 years earlier, in 1975. Yeah, I know...dumb place to keep it, but I never thought I'd be a victim of theft.

Anyway, there were people who came into the office on a regular basis, and till the last day I worked there, I suspected each and every one of them. Sort of sucked.

[JoeyT]

17. You're correct.

It's not only possible to disable a stolen laptop, it would be easier to do than fiddling with the webcams.
There are several companies that sell software (and some hardware) to do just that.

If you *really* want to stop laptops from being stolen, there are solutions that are far better. There's one company that makes a PCMCIA card that the laptop won't work without. The card also has a 3G modem, GPS, and a self contained battery. It doesn't tell you who's using it or whether they're eating candy that looks like pills, but it does send you directly to the laptop's location.

I guess none of those are nearly as much fun as watching unsuspecting teenagers.

[TorchTheWitch]

8. Lower Merion webcam issue - school violated third-party rights

ON EDIT *Just so people know, I had made this post as an OP without realizing someone else had beat me to it and asked that the two threads be combined since they're basically the same, so that's why it's in this thread now as a reply. Sorry folks, I'm usually pretty good at not doing a dupe.
:blush:

http://www.philly.com/inquirer/currents/92030359.html
Posted on Sun, Apr. 25, 2010
Head Strong: Web cam violated third-party rights
By Michael Smerconish

More significant were the additional images Haltzman permitted me to review. No, not the image of Robbins shirtless. Or the one in which he's asleep in front of the laptop. Most shocking were the ones showing the faces or worded Internet postings of individuals with whom Robbins was communicating.

...

Their images represent a gross violation of privacy akin to listening in on a private telephone communication between two individuals, at least one of whom has absolutely no idea of the presence of an interloper. That's the real outrage in this case, how the privacy of innocent third parties - classmates, friends, family members, and parents - was compromised.

...

Who gave Lower Merion the right to intrude on those communications? Regardless of whether Blake Robbins stole a computer (there appears to be no evidence that he did), whether he is a problem student, whether he missed a required insurance payment, whether his parents owe Peco money, or any of the other Main Line buzz that has surrounded this case, it was inexcusable for the school district to invade the privacy of third parties en route to violating that of Blake Robbins.

...

A different listener had a better analogy. What if Comcast did what Lower Merion did? What if someone was delinquent with a cable payment or lost a cable box, and Comcast threw a switch and took a peek at what was going on in front of that box sitting on top of your TV? There would be hell to pay, and appropriately so.

.................

A point that's been largely overlooked in this invasion of privacy issue is that of those people who's privacy was grossly invaded merely because they communicated with students through their school issued laptops where those communications were spied on by the school. According to the article, the tracking system took TWO images every 15 minutes while the computer was on and the tracking was activated - one image was taken by the webcam and the second image was a screen capture of whatever was happening on the computer at that time.

Most of this story is about the webcam images, but little has been said about the screen capture images. There were screen capture images that included emails or IM chats of third parties whose private communications were also violated. Webcam images violated third parties as well since the spycam took a photo of whatever and WHOever happened to be in the frame at the time, but for some reason not much of anything has been said about screen captures of private communications. This is the first time I've seen anything said in any article about what other privacy violations were going on that didn't involve the webcam.

As an aside, since a lot of the article is more of a summary of the issue particularly in the beginning of the article, I picked out some of the more interesting bits especially considering that most people here don't seem to read an entire linked article.

[drm604]

9. I am in awe at the level of stupidity involved in this.

Even if they didn't give a damn about morality and ethics, surely someone should have thought about the legal implications of what they were doing.

The economic costs to the Lower Merion taxpayers that will likely result from this dwarf the cost of some stolen laptops. And none of this was necessary to track down a stolen laptop anyway. A GPS unit in the laptop would have been sufficient.

One has to wonder if someone somewhere didn't have some other (perhaps sick voyeuristic) motive for doing this.

[KittyWampus]

10. As am I. It's a level of stupid that goes a full quantum leap from other stories I've read.

[tammywammy]

16. So has the school district given up on the whole line

that they only turned on the camera when the computer was reported lost or stolen...since the reason they turn this one on was supposedly because the parents failed to pay the $55 insurance fee.

I cannot believe the comments I've read on the articles, where people blame the parents for all of this (money grubbers, etc). The school district had NO right to invade the privacy of people's homes. It was spying, including where they were taking the screen shot of other communications. I wonder if that PA is a two part consent to a wiretap...but then did the student consent to be filmed either, since the district did not tell the parents/students about this ability of theirs until AFTER the lawsuit.

This whole thing stinks.

[TorchTheWitch]

21. they've had to

There own attorney found that they were turned on for other reasons besides tracking lost or stolen computers, there were 15 cases where he couldn't discover why they were turned on and in many cases they either forgot or otherwise failed to turn off the tracking after the laptops were found.

http://www.philly.com/philly/news/breaking/91542204.html

PA does require two party consent...

http://www.citmedialaw.org/legal-guide/pennsylvania/pennsylvania-recording-law

However, it appears that the law only refers to audio or written communications. I'm not sure what specific law it is that makes it illegal to video someone in their home.

Also remember that minors are not able to give consent.

[malaise]

20. 100% correct n/t