Loss of Privacy

By now, you’ve heard the story of the school district in Pennsylvania spying on its students via webcams from laptops that the students took home. This has been covered to death this week, so, here’s a video and some links in case you want to know more.

The webcams were activated 42 times over a 14-month period.

It’s one thing to attempt to install security procedures to protect against the loss of a laptop. It’s quite another when those procedures appear to have been enacted without the knowledge of students or parents and leave the school open not only to all of the charges already leveled in the Robbins’ lawsuit, but also–as in the case of a student who leaves her laptop open in the shower to listen to music–to charges of child pornography.

The school district is being sued [pdf] .

The school sent out a letter to parents. This is their initial response.

The complaint alleges that they are in violation of:

The Electronic Communications Privacy Act
The Computer Fraud Abuse Act
The Stored Communications Act
Section 1983 of the Civil Rights Act
The Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution
The Pennsylvania Wire-tapping and Electronic Surveillance Act
Pennsylvania Common Law

The local DA and the FBI are now investigating.

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Police were called to Millennial Tech Magnet Middle School in San Diego after the vice principal concluded that a student brought a bomb to school as a science project. The vice principal saw the student showing the project to another student and overreacted. The student’s project was meant to be a type of motion detector.

Luque said the project was made of an empty half-liter Gatorade bottle with some wires and other electrical components attached. There was no substance inside.

When police and the Metro Arson Strike Team responded, they also found electrical components in the student’s backpack, Luque said. After talking to the student, it was decided about 1 p.m. to evacuate the school as a precaution while the item was examined. Students were escorted to a nearby playing field, and parents were called and told they could come pick up their children.

A MAST robot took pictures of the device and X-rays were evaluated. About 3 p.m., the device was determined to be harmless, Luque said.

Why did it take all day, with x-rays from a robot to determine it was harmless? The student and the parents were very cooperative. Can the Strike Team not understand basic electronics? If they can’t, how did they get on the Strike Team?

Police also went to the student’s home and found nothing, however, the student and his parents have been advised to seek counseling because he violated school policies. Presumably, these violations include the independent thought process. The article, nor the school, specifies which policy was violated.

Instead of calling the authorities and overreacting, the vice principal should have asked to see the project and the student in the office. This way, the vice principal could ascertain whether or not there was a real threat. Instead, he chose the panic route and disrupted everyone’s lives. Another tip would be not to put the school on lockdown when you suspect that a bomb is in the building. You evacuate everyone from the building.

The only people in this story that need counseling are the vice principal and the Strike Team. This school is a tech school and as such, the vice principal should have some knowledge of electronics. He could gain valuable information just by walking in the hallways and talking to students. If he doesn’t understand these basics, then he shouldn’t be allowed to retain his position.

The school should also pay for any counseling that the family needs because it was their fault that the family has been traumatized.

Since the student is in a magnet tech school, he should immediately go home and build everything in this book. Just don’t bring it to school. That way, his imagination continues to be encouraged outside of the box called school.

At the Highlands campus of White Plains Middle School in New York, students are now using finger scans in order to receive a school lunch. Tapped as a way to make school lunch lines move faster, many parents and privacy advocates are worried about the students’ identities.

“People were a little nervous, but they’re not in the cafeteria when we are trying to serve 373 students at a time — to get them all seated, fed and out for recess especially with the kinds of things they were using before,” the principal, Diana Knight, said.

In the end, only five of the more than 1,000 students opted out, and the family of one cited germs, not privacy abuses, as a concern, Knight said.

The rest of the students can now press a forefinger to an image pad to pay for their food. The older methods, swiping a debit card or entering a personal identification number, or PIN, also remain available.

The school is using technology from School-Link Technologies, which claim a fingerprint can’t be made of the information because the data is saved as a set of numbers. It remains to be seen as to whether the information can be reverse engineered to get the fingerprint.

Michigan and Iowa currently have laws prohibiting the use of biometrics among school students unless ordered to do so by a court of law. The United Kingdom currently has several schools using biometrics for lunches as well as in the library and for registration. The EU is using it to identify refugees. Hong Kong, however, has deemed the use of biometrics on students as too invasive and scrapped their program several years ago.

The New York Civil Liberties Union for the Lower Hudson Valley and the EFF question the use of such technology as a means of softening up children for eventual, ubiquitous use of biometrics as surveillance tools.

“It’s a new technology so people are a little bit uncertain about it,” she said. “But I think as it becomes more widely used — and they see that some of what they’re concerned about isn’t coming to be regarding privacy and how the finger scans are used — I think people will become a lot more comfortable with it.”

And this is precisely the point. If you force people to use these technologies when they are small and cannot understand the implications of said technologies, they will think it’s cool and not understand why others are so concerned. Biometric identification will become widespread, but only because it will become required, forcing those who wish to opt-out, no option at all.

While it appears that this TED talk doesn’t quite fit the premise behind Loss of Privacy, it remains important because, without creativity, children will grow up intolerant of new ideas and other people.

Sir Ken Robinson makes an entertaining and profoundly moving case for creating an education system that nurtures (rather than undermines) creativity.