School goes too far

The more prevalent technology gets, the less privacy we all have.

One Pennsylvania student with a school issued laptop has allegedly been spied upon at home via the computer's built-in webcam and a program called boing-boing.

The story should disgust parents and students alike. The schools should have the right to monitor what a child does on their computers. It's their property. They should even have the right to monitor what children do at all times while they are at school--it's their responsibility.

Taking pictures of a child, at home, without his or her parents' consent, that is an invasion of privacy and a violation of the Civil Rights Act.

Stories like this one are only going to get more common as social media networking programs such as Facebook and Twitter continue to blur the lines between a person's public and private lives.

The student may have been doing something he wasn't supposed to on the laptop. That's not the point, there are other ways to prove that such as web search logs and cookies. What we do need to take note of is that what we do can be monitored.

Posting photos on the Internet, making comments on a friend's Facebook profile, tweeting--all of these things can be viewed by far more people than we intend.

Parents you need to inform your children that there is no such thing as true privacy on-line. Bosses and teachers can use it against you. The high school may have been in the wrong, but the trend of monitoring Internet behaviour isn't going to go away.

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