Pennsylvania School District Sued Again for Spying on Students

Remember back in February a school district in Philadelphia got slapped with a lawsuit for spying on students at home via the cameras on school-issued laptops?

You'd think they'd have learned their lesson. But now another lawsuit has been filed against them.

According to the Associated Press (News - Alert), Jalil Hasan, who graduated from Lower Merion High School last spring, "says the school district activated remote-tracking software after he left the laptop at school December 18."

The lawsuit filed Tuesday in federal court says "the laptop was returned three days later, but the surveillance software remained activated for about two months," the AP reports, adding that the suit alleges that "more than 1,000 photos were taken, 469 from the webcam and 543 screen shots."

TheLower Merion School District, “in response to a suit filed by a student,” the Associated Press said, acknowledged that webcams, which came standard in laptops issued to students – who were not told that the cameras could be remotely activated by the school district – were remotely activated 42 times in the past 14 months.

School officials claim the secret feature was “only to find missing, lost or stolen laptops,” according to the AP. Neither students nor parents were ever informed of the spycam capability the school district had secretly built into the laptops.

Yet the issue of the spycams came to light when Harriton High School Vice Principal Lindy Matsko called a student, Blake Robbins, into her office and allegedly showed him a photo the remote spycam had taken inside the Robbins’ home.

Robbins’s laptop was not reported as being stolen. School district officials have not explained publicly why the laptop’s spy feature was activated without Robbins’s knowledge.

According to the AP, Robbins and his parents, Michael and Holly Robbins, “filed a federal civil rights lawsuit Tuesday against the district, its board of directors and McGinley. They accused the school of turning on the webcam in his computer while it was inside their Penn Valley home, which they allege violated wiretap laws and his right to privacy.”