Privacy Expectations

This Philadelphia case is interesting. If the School District believes it can get away with the argument that people don't have an expectation of privacy in their own homes, I believe they have a surprise coming:

Blake Robbins should have known better.

So says the official who ran the Lower Merion School District's controversial computer security system when it snapped Robbins' picture in his home and led to his invasion-of-privacy suit against the district.

Even in his own home, the Harriton High School sophomore had "no legitimate expectation of privacy" from the camera on his school-issued laptop, information systems coordinator Carol Cafiero contended in a court filing on Tuesday.

Cafiero - who is on paid leave while the district investigates the laptop controversy - claimed Robbins lost any legal protection from the Web-camera security system when he took a school laptop home without permission.

Robbins had previously broken "at least two" school computers and did not pay the insurance fee required to get permission to take home the Apple MacBook that later snapped his pictures, Cafiero's attorney, Charles Mandracchia, wrote in the filing.

"When you're in the home, you should have a legitimate expectation of privacy," Mandracchia said in an interview. "But if you're taking something without permission, how can you cry foul when you shouldn't have it anyway?"

Mandracchia's court filing and comments came on the heels of the district's latest disclosures about the volume of photos and "screen shots" taken over two years by the high-tech security system that was designed to track lost or stolen laptops.

District officials said Monday that the built-in cameras on students' laptops had been switched on 146 times, taking 56,000 pictures in the process.