Well, there out there.
You should assume the worst of any human being in a position of power (especially over your own children) unless you are in a position to verify with acceptable levels of certainty that they are physically, practically incapable of abusing their power.
And as @Melz2 states, your kids may be fine, but you don’t know if other members of your community will have a different experience. You’re essentially saying, “I’ve trained my kids to not be stupid. It sucks for anyone else who didn’t know to make sure to close the laptop or tape off the camera before undressing.”
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Never mind the school, if I were a blackmailer — either as my main source of income or as an enthusiastic amateur — the school’s surveillance stream would be a rich seam of blackmail material for my exploitation. Getting on the staff, or hacking the records, either would be equally tempting.
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In Soviet Russia, school learns you!
Oh, wait…
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Having grown up in Rhode Island, I can say this with authority: quoting one of my dearest friends in the world, after her first visit to the state. “It’s Texas but with an inferiority complex!”
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I’d just like to make sure that everyone remembers what it was that got the Pennsylvania case started:
On February 20, 2010, Haltzman, Robbins’ counsel, told MSNBC Live that Robbins had been sitting in his home eating “Mike and Ike” candy in front of his school-issued laptop. The attorney said that the vice-principal had accused Robbins of taking illegal pills after seeing him eating the candy in a webcam image.
(From wiki)
This is how they found out, not that the district could do this, but that they had. The kid ate some candy, possibly while doing homework on the school issued laptop.
Do you want to go through that? Do you want your kid to?
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A female co-worker of mine discovered that our corporate email system would delete any message containing the word lesbian but she won’t say what she was discussing when she found that little bit of info.
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A. You’re an adult
B. They’re not spying on you - that you know of.
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Especially when you combine that with this:
If you’ve got the tech savvy to know that any computer is a potential surveillance device, good for you. If you’ve got enough money to hire lawyers when you’re falsely accused, likewise.
Most people are not in that position.
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If you read the original post, at some schools the students and parents are told they may use the school computers for personal use:
[quote]Further, some school districts specifically acknowledge that the
1:1 computers can be used for nonRschool work at home, and at
least one policy encourage parents to use the devices[/quote]
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I did see that you could use the computers for personal use, the question is do you want to? I can use my company Email account for personal use, but by doing so I will leave my personal Emails on their servers that can be legally monitored or in some instances read by my company.
You should understand that if the device is owned by someone else the data on that device may be viewable by the owner or their representatives. Places like school districts often do not have proper protections in place to prevent misuse.The Media PA incident was caused by setting up the computers so that the cameras could be remotely and clandestinely enabled. The intent (we were told) of this was said to be if the laptops were reported missing, but an overreaching employee decided to use this feature for spying on students at home.
If you do not own the device, just assume you are being monitored, and act accordingly. Quorihunter mentioned that it was expressly stated that with these laptops “Privacy is not an expectation”. Would you accept a free network WebCam from your local frat house?
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Sounds like an excellent opportunity to teach your kids how to put the device in dev mode, flash a legacy BIOS, boot a live Linux distro off a flash drive, then do a full installation onto a second USB 3.0 drive.
Then they can boot into a full Linux distro when they don’t want to be monitored.
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Does having a laptop improve anyone’s education?
I ask because it seems that everyone here is accepting the basic premise of the laptop and arguing over implementation details while ignoring what seems to be a much more important issue and that is radical changes in how education is performed.
So, does anyone know if issuing school owned computers is:
-
cost effective
-
delivers better education (for whatever value of ‘better’ you prefer).
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My son has an ipad which is required by the school. The original concept was that they would get e-books, rather than lug 20 kg of books too and from school. It hasn’t worked out like that. They still need a lot of paper books.
The school has an online system for submitting work, but its unreliable. Work goes missing.
Having an ipad gives the students 100 different ways of goofing off. Games are banned on school ipads but this won’t stop social media and games get installed anyway.
The confined workspace of the ipad is difficult to work with. If you have a task to do, you have to flip backwards and forwards between the class material, reference material, tools (like a calculator) and a web browser (for reference) its tedious.
I have to say that I am not impressed.
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I fully believe everything you are saying, and do not doubt the good intentions of your school. However, asking for you kids to have a smidgen of legal protection of their privacy should not be out of the question.
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OpSec is hard. It’s hard for businesses/schools/government and it’s hard for citizens. I worked for a company that did government work and we had some serious computer security in place. No user was an admin. You could NOT install anything, including drives, without involving IT. Websites were blacklisted. Email addresses were monitored in real time and if we tried to send something to a suspicious address we had to enter a reason before the mail was sent. You couldn’t bypass and boot to Linux on a stick. Those things were locked up tight. They were for business only use, period. I had one device for work and one for home.
If the school IT department chooses to not lock down the devices, then the school is not engaged in any meaningful OpSec. They leave open the option for all kinds of rogue software, worms, ransom-ware and malware to infect not just the laptops but the entire network. If they’re doing this, they are idiots. Yes, that level of network and hardware security costs money, takes time, and is complex but if you opt to bring networked tech into the picture, you can pay for the tools up front or pay in repair costs, not to mention lawsuits, later.
What about homes that can’t afford personal tech? OK, let’s think about this. Before the school laptops were provided, these homes had no computers (or smart phones), right? So no social media, no link clicking, no nothing. Now the school provides a resource intended for school use. How exactly has the home situation changed? They didn’t have personal computers before, they still don’t. Does it suck that they have tech they can’t use for personal use? You betcha but fundamentally nothing has changed.
So people being people, they use it for personal use anyway. I could use my work laptop to visit a subset of sites on the web and waste time. At that point, it’s up to me to figure out how to use the device without compromising my security. Tape over the damn camera, cover the mic, for the FSM’s sake, stay the hell off sketchy sites, bag the laptop when not in use. You know the school has the option to spy on you, why would you not take care to limit the damage? Yeah, I get it, most people never think about this level of personal security (do you use https everywhere, a vpn, clear your logs, not accept cookies, run your browser in a VM, etc?) but it’s a skill we all need to learn because it’s only going to get worse. I think I’d look at this situation as a learning opportunity for both the school and the students. It’s complicated.
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It’s quite fortunate that you have this option. But not all families can afford even one personal computer, much less one per member.
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What is most disturbing is all the comments from people who have no problem with a school district - or anyone for that matter - doing this. The late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s “defining deviancy down” taken to a whole new level…
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