Schools across the U.S. are starting to rethink the abundance of digital devices in classrooms. After pouring billions of dollars into laptops, tablets and learning apps, a growing number of schools say it is time to scale back.
The school elected to enable TheftTrack to allow school district employees to secretly and remotely activate the standard webcam featured in all Apple laptops since 2006.[17][25][26][27] That allowed school officials to secretly take photographs through the webcam, of whatever was in front of it and in its line of sight, and send the photographs to the school’s server.[9][17] The system took and sent a new photograph every 15 minutes when the laptop was on, and TheftTrack was activated, though school employees could adjust the timeframe to as low as one-minute intervals.[9][28][29] LANrev disabled the webcams for all other uses (e.g., students were unable to use Photo Booth or video chat), so most students mistakenly believed that their webcams did not work at all.[30]
It doesn’t need an answer because it was rhetorical. The devices do that because they are owned by Google, and the license they did not read or care about granted Google permission to do that and was foisted upon every family in the district without their consent or any means to opt out or alternatives.
A bigger problem is school sponsored spyware on the devices. Weird how they don’t mention that:
https://www.eff.org/wp/school-issued-devices-and-student-privacy
https://time.com/7275031/spy-high-true-story-prime-video/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/feb/19/schools-spied-on-students-webcams
I’m not sure how that’s a surprise to anyone. Keep your personal stuff off hardware that doesn’t belong to you.
They used the onboard cameras to take pictures of kids in their bedrooms.
That is a problem, but usage monitoring software should be expected.
Dude, don’t normalise this bullshit. Wtf.
What bullshit, making sure kids use school property only for school?
Or did you mistakenly think I was suggesting that accessing the webcam was a part of usage monitoring software?
Then keep it fucking at school.
It shouldn’t be in homes. Its a constitutional violation. Schools are state sponsored and tax funded.
They shouldn’t be legally allowed to record shit in a private home with out a warrant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbins_v._Lower_Merion_School_District
And? I wasn’t talking about remote webcam monitoring software.
it comes with the territory
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Then refusal to use it should also be expected, but they have zero accommodation for that.
Right, because it’s only supposed to be used for school purposes.
The school’s purposes don’t include scanning my home network. Why do their devices do that?
I can’t answer that with the limited information you’ve provided.
It doesn’t need an answer because it was rhetorical. The devices do that because they are owned by Google, and the license they did not read or care about granted Google permission to do that and was foisted upon every family in the district without their consent or any means to opt out or alternatives.
No. Keep your creepy spy hardware off of kids that don’t belong to you.
now try explaining that to a kid. it’ll maybe stick in high school.
It’s definitely a surprise to most students. Not really reasonable to expect people who have never been taught tech to understand tech.
It’s actually a pretty important lesson for them to learn