Privacy Invasion!

Image from http://static.arstechnica.com/2010/02/18/thumb_kids_laptops_ars.jpg

According to some recent articles, parents are suing their child's school because they claim that the school used a school-issued computer to spy on their child at home.  The laptops that the school district issued out have webcams that can be covertly accessed by school administrators, but they didn't tell anyone that they could or would do that.  This is ridiculous and kind of creepy.  Although the details of the situation are not clear as to if the school can access the webcam at any time or if they can only look at things saved on to the computers by the students, I think that it was wrong that the school didn't say that they had this ability. Also, I find it ironic that if the school was so worried about what the students would do with these computers and worried about the students' online safety, their solution was to spy on them.