Digital Home Thoughts: Public Schools are Watching You. They See Your Every Move.

"The lawsuit claims that the school district used a webcam shot as evidence of mysterious "improper behavior" at home on the part of the student. The high school's vice president confirmed to the parents that the school district can remotely activate webcams to spy on students."

Issues about privacy on the Internet have been making the rounds again. There is the site PleaseRobMe.com, which scrapes Twitter posts to find out who is not at home, and now there is news of how some school provided laptops have spyware installed, allowing officials to see what their students are doing through the laptop's webcam. At the moment, I think these are just accusations and there is no conclusive proof outside of an ambiguous statement by the school president. While I know that the technology exists for schools to do this, there are a wealth of reasons why doing so could open them up to a lot bucket truck load googolplex of litigation. Especially if they caught one of their students changing; Remember, these are minors. There is the flip side, being to what extent should publicly subsidized equipment be monitored? Do schools have the right to make sure their hardware is being treated properly and not used to surf questionable content? Would we be seeing the same brouhaha if all they monitored was Internet traffic? Is that any different than a parent monitoring their children through web tracking software?