"Dear LMSD Parents/Guardians,
Our history has been to go to great lengths to protect the privacy of our students, whether it comes to student health, academic or other records. In fact, many of you may remember the heated debate over whether to have security cameras monitor some of our food vending machines. Privacy is a basic right in our society and a matter we take very seriously. We believe that a good job can always be done better.
Recent publicity regarding the District's one-to-one high school laptop initiative, and questions about the security of student laptops prompted our administration to revisit security procedures.
Laptops are a frequent target for theft in schools and off school property. District laptops do contain a security feature intended to track lost, stolen and missing laptops. The security feature, which was disabled today, was installed to help locate a laptop in the event it was reported lost, missing or stolen so that the laptop could be returned to the student.
Upon a report of a suspected lost, stolen or missing laptop, the feature would be activated by the District's security and technology departments. The security feature's capabilities were limited to taking a still image of the operator and the operator's screen. This feature was only used for the narrow purpose of locating a lost, stolen or missing laptop. The District never activated the security feature for any other purpose or in any other manner whatsoever.
As a result of our preliminary review of security procedures today, I directed the following actions:
Immediate disabling of the security-tracking program.
- A thorough review of the existing policies for student laptop use.
- A review of security procedures to help safeguard the protection of privacy, including a review of the instances in which the security software was activated. We want to ensure that any affected students and families are made aware of the outcome of laptop recovery investigations.
- A review of any other technology areas in which the intersection of privacy and security may come into play.
We are proud of the fact that we are a leader in providing laptops to every high school student as part of our instructional program. But we need to be equally as proud of the safeguards we have in place to protect the privacy of the users, as well as to safeguard district-owned property while being used by students.
We regret if this situation has caused any concern or inconvenience among our students and families. If you have any questions or concerns, please email us at info@lmsd.org. Additional information has been posted on our website, www.lmsd.org.
Thank you for your time and attention.
Sincerely,
Dr. Christopher W. McGinley
Superintendent of Schools
Lower Merion School District
301 East Montgomery Ave.
Ardmore, PA 19003
610.645.1800
Lower Merion School District
301 East Montgomery Ave.
Ardmore, PA 19003
610.645.1800
What forced this letter of explanation was a class action lawsuit filed last Thursday, February 11th, in Federal Court, by parents angry over this invasion of privacy by the schools. [You Can Read The Court Filing Here]
The lawsuit was filed after an incident whereby the issue came to light when the student named as primary plaintiff in the Court Action was disciplined for "improper behavior in his home" and the Vice Principal used a photo taken by the webcam as evidence.
As a parent, as a journalist, and as a member of a supposedly free society, I am appalled by the deviousness of the schools decision to include that type of spy software without any regard to privacy concerns and in fact, possible criminal behaviour on the part of school employees. Let's face it folks, there is too much room for abuse here. Teenagers, or at least mine, hide out in their rooms for privacy and thus with this kind of software would be exposed to persons who logically might take advantage of this with the end results being posted on the web and mostly likely on adult entertainment sites.
That is not the only issue though, the other issue is reasonable expectation of individuals to have the basic right to privacy without intrusion by the government which quite obviously is not the case with those laptops.
The responsible parties here in the school district need to be fired, not disciplined-the offending laptops need to have that software removed, and the superintendent needs to find another career as I would have real concerns about the privacy, security, and integrity of any school system with that kind of clown running it.
Posts
1 comments:
All I can say is that such alleged security features would be unlawful in the European Union. The only way of making it lawful is to gain the informed consent of each and every user of such a laptop.
Even so, the report of some sort of reprimand for a student would be outside any permission envelope, and would of itself be unlawful. By 'unlawful' I mean against the criminal law.
It would also have caused distress, but probably not a pecuniary loss, so a lawsuit seeking damages would be unlikely to succeed here. However our Information Commissioner would be likely to serve an enforcement notice making any such future action by the school very unwise indeed.
Post a Comment