Back in April I wrote a post about the webcam privacy lawsuit that was taking place at the local high schools in my hometown school district. If you want more info on the case, I’d recommend the Wikipedia page on it.
The case was settled out of court (surprise) a few days ago, with the end result being $610,000 of my district’s tax dollars being given away because of their acts of stupidity.
This case is really a Catch-22 for everyone involved. We want to get to the bottom of this, but we don’t want it to cost us more than it has to. That was the problem. The district would have to pay for the investigation, litigation, and then pay out the consequences. We let it end early without truly getting to the bottom of it so we could be cheap. That’s not really justice. That’s part of what’s wrong with our legal system (for more, watch The Wire).
I’m not a legal eagle nor do I totally understand the inner-workings of the court system, but the part that blows my mind in this case is that the lawyer gets $425,000, which is over $200k more than the “victim” himself gets. How does that possibly work? What kind of messed up system is this?
What else is astonishing is how much the district found out during the review – over 56,000 (or 66k, unconfirmed) images had been recorded – on only 2,300 computers. That’s over 24 images per computer. WHAT? For a system that was supposed to be in use “in case the computer goes missing” that is absurd. You can’t tell me they had that many cases. Absolutely not. They took pictures while kids were asleep? That’s creepy and the next phase should be to prosecute the administrators responsible. Seriously. This isn’t some kind of a “no big deal” joke. This is invasion of privacy of adolescents. We’ve seen so much in the news lately towards cyber-bullying and webcam photos/videos that there should be zero tolerance of this from anyone, and that starts with the faculty. Instead, they are doing the same thing, and could cause just as many problems as the students do. But no, we’re too cheap to do the right thing. Carry on.
Clearly the people with power have no control. That’s what bothers me the most; the irresponsibility of the administrators in a situation that is supposed to be conducive to learning. Great job everyone. Making my hometown proud.
This just proves the incapability of the educational system.
Hey does anyone wanna video chat later?
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