the Informer

We are living in a society that is interconnected more than ever. We can be in other people’s homes around the world with the press of a button.

Usually this is with consent. For Blake Robbins of Harriton Senior High School in a suburb of Philadelphia, he didn’t get that option. Instead, he accuses the school district of spying on him with laptop issued by the school.

Alledgedly, a school administrator called Robbins into the office and accused him of taking pills, showing Robbins a picture of him from his bedroom.

This is absurdity on so many levels. I beg someone to find me a person who finds this process defendable.

School officials should be ashamed of themselves for allowing this to happen. The school is accused of doing this 42 times total. There are so many reasons why this is wrong. The software that allows administrators to look in on students should have only be used when a laptop was stolen. This, instead, allowed students’ privacy, the walls they live behind, be completely obliterated.

It is possible that administrators saw students, some of whom are minors, undressed. If that is the case, they should be leveled with criminal child pornography charges.

Sure, the laptops were issued by the school and the school has every right to protect their property. But when school policy, according to a blog post from a site called “Stryde Hax,” says that school policy required students to use only the school-issued computers and that other computers would not be permitted in classrooms. 

Not only that, the post continues, the camera was not able to be disabled by students. 

And the thing I can’t help but think as all of this news comes out about this spying on students is: Orwell was right. It feels like more and more of recent privacy intrusions are leading us into the society depicted in George Orwell’s “1984.”
Technology has improved our lives in so many ways – information is available at the click of a mouse or a tap of a touchscreen. Medical information has greatly improved with the help of technological advances.

Computers are important in keeping our planes in the sky and our entire infrastructure is built on technology. 

However, we have to be mindful of heading into a society not only when we’re giving up privacy: full body scans at the airport, search records on sites going to advertisers looking to make profits off of search, Facebook in and of itself is a privacy black hole.

Amazon’s Kindle had its privacy failure when the company removed unauthorized versions of Orwell’s books (including “1984”) late last year. 

And we submit ourselves to giving up privacy every day for the purposes of it being convenient. But when a school knowingly activates a camera on a student’s laptop for the purpose of seeing what he or she is doing, it is absolutely terrifying. 

Where do we draw the line? It’s impossible to know, as companies are knowingly peering into our lives and we don’t care, but when things like Robbins’ story occur I can’t help but think they’ve crossed that line.