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Imagine if Walmart Did This to Its “Customers”
April 16, 2010 Education

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.

More than once, the motion asserts, the camera on Robbins’ school-issued laptop took photos of Robbins as he slept in his bed. Each time, it fired the images off to network servers at the school district.

Back at district offices, the Robbins motion says, 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.

From the Agitator. In the land of the unicorns, this is just an excusable offense in the name of pursuing the social good.

"2" Comments
  1. FYI, Lower Merion Township is in Montgomery County, PA, exactly at the opposite end of the county where I live. This story was big news last winter. My first reaction was how come the kid was allowed to take the school’s laptop home with him in the first place?

    I know I’m old fashioned, but it was not a small deal for me to buy my daughter her first laptop to replace the computer we bought for her as a freshman in college, and the government-run schools in Lower Merion are buying laptops for kids to take home and (JOKE) type their weekly essays?

    The kid should have put the computer in the trunk of his (!) car before he went to bed, so Big Sister could not watch him sleep, or whatever he did after he put the computer in the trunk.

    The school district should fire at least ten people, saving at least a million and a half, assuming they can fire them. Kick the kid out of school. Better yet, abolish the school, and give the parents vouchers.

    I’m not going to go extreme and say, “Put them all in the trunk of some car.”

    Just in case you’d like to know, our local government-run high school just installed artificial turf on the football field and elsewhere for $1.2K. The coaches were complaining about the dust. I think they should next build an indoor parking garage.

  2. I posted about this today as well. Can you imagine if a private school did this? Or God forbid, a Catholic school?!

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