A couple of months ago I wrote a post about Google Latitude which generated some impassioned responses. The gist of the comments was that Latitude was very Big Brotherish. Well kids you ain’t seen nothing yet. Last year the Lower Merion School District moved into the 21st century and provided laptops to their students. So far so good. On the Apple laptops are webcams that can be remotely monitored. Not just can be but were allegedly used to spy on a student at home.
I came across this story via the Location Meme blog post entitled The Aliens of Lower Merion County. Location Meme sourced an article that discusses a class action lawsuit filed by a student who was reportedly reprimanded for “improper behaviour at home“. Isn’t that his parent’s job? How did the school find out about this? They took a picture of the improper behaviour via the school’s computer and showed it to the student. The school district has since shut off this feature. Here is a link to the school district’s announcement.
About 8 years ago I worked on a project for the Ojo Video Phone. You sometimes see the characters on NCSI using this phone. When I first met with the folks that made the phone they gave me a little demonstration of the phone. I noticed that the phone had this decidedly low tech feature – a door over the camera. I asked why low-tech was used instead of say and LED. It turns out that users were generally freaked out by the idea that a camera could be spying on them. I guess they were right! I wonder if you took a survey how many people would report that they stick something over their computer’s built in camera?