Laptop surveillance kid was disciplined when spying authorities mistook candies for pills

By at 1:14 pm Monday, Feb 22

According to the lawyer for the family of the boy whose school spied on him at home through a covert webcam application on his laptop, the boy was disciplined for eating candies that bear a passing resemblance to pills.

The Lower Merion School District has admitted that the laptops it distributed to students were configured so that administrators could activate their webcams without alerting the user, but insists that the spying capability was only used to help find stolen laptops.

However, the lawyer for the Robbins family says that their son was called into the vice-principal's office and confronted with a photo secretly snapped by his laptop's webcam while he was eating Mike & Ike's candy, and he was accused of taking drugs.

The boy was charged with an undisclosed infraction based on an image the school picked up from his webcam. District superintendent Christopher W. McGinley, in an orotund statement, defends the program while canceling it. And just to make clear that we're still in high school, Master Robbins appears to have gotten in trouble when he was photographed eating Mike and Ikes.
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(Image: redthings.JPG, a Creative Commons Attribution photo from Max Kiesler's photostream)

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Cory Doctorow

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