Harriton High School - Laptop Privacy Lawsuit

Laptop Privacy Lawsuit

In the 2010 WebcamGate case, plaintiffs charged Harriton High School and Lower Merion High School secretly spied on students by surreptitiously and remotely activating webcams embedded in school-issued laptops the students were using at home, and therefore infringed on their privacy rights. The schools admitted to secretly snapping over 66,000 webshots and screenshots, including webcam shots of students in their bedrooms. In October 2010, the school district agreed to pay $610,000 to settle the Robbins and parallel Hasan lawsuits against it.

On February 11, 2010, the plaintiffs filed a lawsuit in the United States District Court, Eastern District of Pennsylvania. The plaintiffs were a Harriton High School student and his parents. Plaintiffs said the student had been confronted by an assistant principal regarding behavior that had occurred in the student's bedroom, based upon an image allegedly taken by the student's webcam. The school district said that a software tracking and security feature it had installed on the students' laptops was only intended to recover stolen laptops, and potentially certain loaner laptops. After the suit was brought, the school district revealed that it had secretly snapped more than 66,000 images.

On February 19, 2010, the School District acknowledged that there had been "no explicit notification that the laptop contained the security software", and that "his notice should have been given and we regret that was not done."

As the result of emergency proceedings commenced by the plaintiffs seeking a temporary restraining order, on February 20, 2010, District Judge Jan E. DuBois ordered that the School District was prohibited from activating the webcams during the litigation, and further ordered the District to preserve all webcam images, data, files, and storage media related to the allegations. The judge also ordered the district to pay plaintiffs' attorney fees for bringing the action.

The complaint alleged violations by the School District of the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution, the Electronic Communication Privacy Act, the Computer Fraud Abuse Act, the Stored Communications Act, Section 1983 of the Civil Rights Act, the Pennsylvania Wiretapping and Electronic Surveillance Act, and Pennsylvania common law.

The Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), U.S. Attorney's Office, and Montgomery County District Attorney all initiated criminal investigations of the matter, which they combined and then closed because they did not find evidence "that would establish beyond a reasonable doubt that anyone involved had criminal intent". In addition, a U.S. Senate Judiciary subcommittee held hearings on the issues raised by the schools' secret surveillance, and Senator Arlen Specter introduced draft legislation in the Senate to protect against it in the future. Parents, media, and academicians criticized the schools, and the matter was cited as a cautionary example of how modern technology can be used to infringe on personal privacy.

In July 2010, another student filed a parallel second suit. The district was put on notice of a third parallel suit that a third student intends to bring against the district, for—following "interrogation" of the student—"improper surveillance of the student on his school issued laptop", which included taking over 700 webcam shots.