So, when a school gives every kid a laptop, you know the school is only interested in making sure the student has access to the latest educational tools available, right?
Well, maybe not. Macbooks given to students in one Pennsylvania school district have a webcam, and they also have this security feature that allows the school district to turn the webcam on remotely. They use this to help locate stolen or lost computers.
Or, one family alleges in a lawsuit, they used it to spy on a student and then accuse him of selling drugs, while he was in his own home. The student denies he was selling drugs, but even if he was, he wasn't at school at the time.
School district officials say that only two school tech workers have access to the remote webcam feature. And of course they'll never leave a password laying around, or let something slip, or get curious about what you might actually see in Joe or Jane Student's bedroom (empty pizza boxes and mountains of dirty clothes in the former, many many home-made signs saying "Edward + Bella 4 EVA!" in the latter), or turn them on to see how the kids treat the machines, and so on. And no student will ever just cover up the webcam, thus defeating this high-tech security system with the equally high-tech post-it note.
And none of this even touches the fact that this school district gave away 1,800 Macbooks -- these run just under a grand retail, and although I doubt the school district paid retail, we're talking about serious coin. Even if they got them at half price, that's still close to a million bucks. State and federal funds paid for the program, which means you and I did.
I don't know about you, but I would rather have paid for a few teachers with that money. Maybe one of them could teach 20th century English literature -- there's a fascinating book by George Orwell that I might recommend for starters.
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