It sounds like a Hollywood movie…but it’s taken directly from the pages of a federal US lawsuit filed in Philadelphia that claims high school teachers secretly installed cameras in hundreds of students’ homes to spy on them.
The class action suit, Robbins v. Lower Merion School District, alleges that 1,800 students were provided with laptop computers equipped with webcams which – unbeknown to the students or their parents – could be activated at any time by teachers and school administrators to spy on the students and their families in their homes.
Shannon Duffy, writing for Law.com, says the school district’s official announcement of a program to provide every student with a laptop was billed it as “an authentic mobile 21st century learning environment” to ensure that “all students have 24/7 access to school based resources”.
But, the suit says, students and parents were never warned “to the fact that the school district has the ability to remotely activate the embedded webcam at any time the school district wished to intercept images from that webcam of anyone or anything appearing in front of the camera.”
The legal action claims a student named Robbins was confronted by Assistant Principal Lindy Matsko with a photo taken from his webcam which, Matsko is alleged to have said, revealed “improper behavior” Robbins had engaged in at home. The complaint offers no details on the nature of the alleged “improper behavior”.
Robbins’ father was later told, the suit says, that school officials had the ability to “remotely activate” the webcam at any time and to capture any images that appeared – without the knowledge or permission of the students or their parents.
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