The increasing use of student surveillance and intrusion of school districts into students’ extra-curricular conduct should alarm us all. Whether it is a district surveilling students in their bedrooms via webcam, conducting random drug or locker searches, strip-searching students, lowering the standard for searching students to “reasonable suspicion” from “probable cause,” disciplining students for conduct outside of school hours, searching their cellphones and text messages, or allegedly forcing them to undergo pregnancy testing, student privacy is under increasing threat.
In this quote from the web site, Pogo Was Right, it’s laid out for us. The schools’ use of surveillance technology is on the rise and students will be conditioned to having it.
Wow, this generation has a rendezvous with destiny. And apparently that destiny is the destruction of their privacy throughout their lives. Gives you a patriotic feeling, doesn’t, … You know. Land of the free and all that.
James Pilant
Pilant's Business Ethics Blog 
“Student Privacy Disappearing!”
And that is different from the rest of us how?
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Not a lot but we as adults have some ability to protest. They don’t. jp
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And what would happen if we didn’t attempt to find out what students were doing?
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We seem to have done okay without electronic monitoring. Training students for the world of 1984 may not be a socially desirable goal.
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It would come as no surprise to the founders that most people don’t see a problem with spying on kids. Actually, most people think ‘if you’ve done nothing wrong you have nothing to worry about from government intrusion.’ The founders didn’t agree. They were unusual people who we should look to for guidance.
Feb. 17 of this year, Boing Boing reported that “According to the filings in Blake J Robbins v Lower Merion School District (PA) et al, the laptops issued to high-school students in the well-heeled Philly suburb have webcams that can be covertly activated by the schools’ administrators, who have used this facility to spy on students and even their families. The issue came to light when the Robbins’s child was disciplined for ‘improper behavior in his home’ and the Vice Principal used a photo taken by the webcam as evidence.”
It was later reported that the student was eating candy, not taking drugs.
Moreover, an investigation revealed that instead of the 42 images that the administration claimed it had taken, there were 58,000 unsolicited images. The administrators found themselves not guilty. Their claim was that nobody above the IT level “knew how TheftTrack worked or understood that it could collect large quantities of webcam photographs or screenshots.”
It seems to me that the administrators are responsible for the actions of their employees. I wonder how the Robbins’s child was disciplined by administrators if the evil ones were the IT people? How many of these systems are being used and misused around the country?
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Great!!
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