No Privacy

Two Lower Merion School District IT workers placed on leave: "The district says it turned on the camera in Robbins' computer because, since he hadn't paid a $55 insurance fee, he should not have been taking it home."...

..."It also has a feature called "Theft Tracker" that lets the network administrators figure out where their computers are - and capture images of who is using them, and what is on the computer screen.

In each case, the tracking has to be turned on for an individual computer. Once that happens, the program will begin snapping photos and recording the computer's Internet location at regular intervals, as long as the laptop is on, open and connected to the Internet.

At Lower Merion, that interval was usually set at the default, 15 minutes.

The photos were snapped and turned over to police not long after Harriton students got their laptops in the fall of 2008. A half dozen laptops were stolen from the Harriton locker room during a gym class, according to people familiar with the incident.

Police were brought in and given access to the remote control photos and screen shots; the information allowed police to recover some of the missing computers.

In a 2008 promotional webcast for LanREV, Perbix spoke enthusiastically about the tracking ability, calling it a "fantastic feature" that had already allowed him to find missing laptops.

Once, he said, he turned it on and found out that a computer that was thought missing was really in a classroom; by the time he checked, the camera had snapped 20 pictures of a teacher and students, he said.

Neff, his attorney, described Perbix as a "hardworking computer guy" who "year round, day after day, takes care of these things like they're his children."

He said that no one in the 26-member technology department was using the system for any other reason other than to locate missing MacBooks.

"There were enough policies in place that no one was running amok with these systems," Neff said. But no one in the district's administration office made those policies official.

"Unfortunately, I don't think they were written policies that were adopted by administrators," Neff said.