As you may have noticed, I’m subscribed to several interesting newsletter, one of them is “Now I Know” by Dan Lewis. Every day you get some nice piece of information. The reason I’m mentioning this newsletter is today’s story that I just received about a Philadelphia-area school that district issued MacBooks in 2009 to their students. But than this happened last november:
“A 15-year-old sophomore named Blake Robbins was in his room — at home — using his school-issued MacBook, which was perfectly okay under the rules mandated by the school. (That is, the school system expected that students would use the machines at home as well as at school, and this was fine.) He wasn’t just surfing the Web, though. A day or two later, officials would assert that Robbins was taking illegal drugs while using the school-provided machine. The school, it turned out, was able to see all the photos taken with the MacBook’s camera. And one of those pictures showed Robbins
sitting at his desk, popping pills.
There were a couple problems with the school’s evidence, though. First, Robbins’ was innocent. He wasn’t taking drugs. He was eating Mike and Ike candies. You know, these. (They look pill-like, sure, but they’d make for a really odd-looking illicit drug.) Second, and more importantly, Robbins didn’t take the picture of himself eating the candy. Yes, his computer’s webcam did, but that’s because the school system turned it on remotely.”
Ouch, really, ouch. Today we have privacy discussions about the influence of big data (and it’s translation in education as learning analytics), but this is so much worse. Maybe I should at a ‘no-funny’ category.