NY Vice-Principal Brags About School's Laptop Spying to PBS [Privacy]

Apparently using laptop webcams to spy on students isn't an isolated problem. An assistant principle in the Bronx recently not only bragged about doing just that to PBS—he demonstrated it live. Head's up: this gets real creepy.


Dan Ackerman is an administrator at Intermediate School 339, in the Bronx, and he appeared in a Frontline segment two weeks ago to demonstrate how they monitor their students' computer usage. The uncomfortable part of the segment, in which he access the webcams of various unknowing middle schoolers, starts at 4:36.
Not only is this clearly a privacy violation on the face of it, Ackerman's attitude gives me the willies:

"A lot of kids are just on it to check their hair, check their make-up: the girls... They don't even realize that we are watching. I always like to mess with them and take a picture."

Also weird: that on one at Frontline thought to raise this as an issue.
But I guess the bigger lesson here, kids, is that all those paranoid fantasies you like to indulge in are actually true. Big Brother is watching, and he's got an unkempt goatee. [PBS via BoingBoing]


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