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Confirmation: US school DID spy on students using their laptops

Laptop You may recall that, back in February, a school in Pennsylvania was accused of spying on students using their school-issued laptops.

An independent report has been released about it today. In essence, it confirms that the story was true and blames the IT personnel:

According to the report… conducted by a local law firm, the IT staff not only failed to inform school officials and administrators of the tracking capabilities of the LANrev software, but argued that telling students about the software's ability to remotely trigger notebook Webcams would "defeat its purpose" as a way to recover lost or stolen computers.

The report also shed light on the incident that led a student and his family to sue the district, and revealed that privacy concerns had been raised by another student as early as 2008.

Lower Merion, of Philadelphia suburb Ardmore, Pa., was first sued by Michael and Holly Robbins, and their teenage son Blake, a high school student at Harriton High School, in mid-February after an assistant principal accused Blake of selling drugs and taking pills, and used a snapshot taken by the computer as evidence. Robbins claimed the pictures showed him eating candy.

By Alex Deane

Posted on May 6, 2010 by Alex Deane Posted in Privacy
  • Purlieu

    A small piece of black tape resides over the wecam in my laptop – trust no one

  • Redacted

    I think it was already pretty clear that they had in fact done this. A member of the IT staff had previously blogged enthusiastically about doing it.
    This report seems to be putting blame squarely on the IT staff. Which is a fact that IT departments everywhere may want to ponder, given the access to systems that they typically have.
    However, I find it hard to believe there was no administrative knowledge of this system and I can’t help being a bit suspicious that the IT department maybe naively omitted to cover their backsides sufficiently and have been hung out to dry as a result.
    The underlying problem here is that the LANrev software was amateurish in its outlook and design. The professional way to implement theft tracking is to enforce a policy of officially requesting a legally responsible, and independent agency to do the actual monitoring, in the event of need. You should not do it yourself. And obviously, laptop recipients should have been informed.

  • ZacS

    It’s called Linux. You can run it off a USB stick, and to them the computer will be turned off, and it’s so easy to use my grandparents use it.

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    The underlying problem here is that the LANrev software was amateurish in its outlook and design

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    This report seems to be putting blame squarely on the IT staff. Which is a fact that IT departments everywhere may want to ponder, given the access to systems that they typically have.