The Pennsylvania case shows how even well-intentioned plans can go awry if officials fail to understand the technology and its potential consequences, privacy experts said. Compromising images from inside a student’s bedroom could fall into the hands of rogue school staff or otherwise be spread across the Internet, they said.
[From Pa. school official defended in webcam spy case - San Jose Mercury News]
It also demonstrates how well-intentioned plans can go awry when officials fail to exercise any, you know, common sense.
I also found this revelation rather amusing…
No one had complained before Harriton High School student Blake Robbins and his parents, Michael and Holly Robbins, filed their lawsuit Tuesday, he said.
No one complained because it’s appears that no one outside of the officials who authorized this system and the IT people, who should have been the first to object, knew about the remote capability. It is incomprehensible to suggest that if parents were made aware of this remote capability that they would have permitted it in their homes. It was only the overreach of school officials that revealed the existence of the remote webcam that is at the center of this lawsuit.
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About Jeff Nolan
My name is Jeff Nolan and I write Venture Chronicles. What started, in 2002, as a simple initiative to understand this thing called “blogs” that I kept hearing about has evolved into something much more significant.
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About Venture Chronicles
About Venture Chronicles
My name is Jeff Nolan and I write Venture Chronicles. What started, in 2002, as a simple initiative to understand this thing called “blogs” that I kept hearing about has evolved into something much more significant.
Along the way to becoming a bona fide blogger I started to understand the implications of user generated content. At the time I was a venture capitalist for SAP, the enterprise software company, and in my travels in the enterprise software market it became evident that blogging would be a powerful communication channel for enterprises to use, what we now call social media, and a powerful information collection mechanism for bottom up corporate intelligence. Combined with search technology, social networking software, and wikis, I was witnessing the inception of an entirely new generation of knowledge management software.
I am currently the VP Product Marketing for Get Satisfaction, the simple and effective way to build online communities that enable productive conversations between companies and their customers. Over 50,000 companies use Get Satisfaction to create a social support experience, build better products, realize SEO benefits, and take advantage of brand loyalty behaviors that results in strong word of mouth marketing experiences in the market.
I can be reached at jnolan-at-gmail-dot-com.
