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Pa. School District Settles with Monitored Students

HeadlineOct 12, 2010

And a suburban Philadelphia school district has reached a $610,000 settlement in two cases stemming from its monitoring of students by remotely activating the cameras on their computer laptops. School officials at the Lower Merion School District have admitted to capturing over 56,000 photographs and screenshots in an effort to recover missing or stolen computers. One of the students to reach a settlement, Blake Robbins, was photographed over 400 times during a fifteen-day period last year, sometimes as he slept or as he was half-dressed at home. The district used images from Robbins’s laptop to accuse him of consuming drugs, only to realize that what it thought were drugs was actually candy.

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