Philadelphia school district web cam scandal? Parents can now look at the pix.

[thewayne]

"Suburban Philadelphia parents and their high school-age children soon will learn the extent of a potentially criminal webcam scandal.

A federal magistrate on Friday ordered the Lower Merion School District to start sending notification letters to any student covertly spied on through their school-issued Macbook, as well as to their parents. The order covers screenshots taken by school officials, and pictures snapped of the pupils through their webcams."

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/05/webcamscandal-parents/

Comments

[deborak]

To me, all this controversy just proves that public school makes for stupid kids. I would have just taped a piece of cardboard over the webcamera which I could remove only when vidchatting with my friends.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

And stupid parents, they should have seen the possibility of the camera being usurped. Agreed, just a piece of black electrical tape would have been fine. My camera is disabled, but the students probably don't have that level of control over their computers.

Have you read Little Brother? I wonder if they could boot an alternate OS on those boxes.

[silveradept]

Excellent! Now there will be no doubt in anyone's mind about the severity of the problem and just what sort of bad things were done.