A recent scandal involving a school's use of remotely activated Webcams to locate lost or stolen laptops may portend, not only legal action against the school, but also a loss of trust in video that is critical to developing video collaboration over the Internet.
Recording someone without a court order is indeed against the law. Reporters must always ask permission to record a subject's voice ahead of time. I'm sure similar laws apply in other private-sector situations.
I think you cover the issue well. The EU, for example worries more about "privacy" in the broad sense of exposing your information (or face and behavior) to the public, where in the US we worry more about our own government!
In the end, different cultures will implement different solutions. You're bringing up an issue that would probably have only tangential interest in the old USSR or East Germany. The computers are the state's and the state will determine how to keep track of them. Big Brother 101.
For those who insist freedom includes freedom from pre-emptive surveillance beyond observation of public spaces, we will have to implement something along the lines of physical safety deposit box security and other two key systems. I do not mean encrypted transactions although those are a necessary part. I mean two parties holding unique keys to gain access. So no misuse occurs without collusion. Which is about all that stands between you and the embezzlers.
I suppose one could make access subject to a warrant at which point a key is distributed and following which a new key is constructed (to be placed under lock and key until needed again). In the circumstances originally presented I think the school board president and the district superintendent would be sufficient.
Unless you want to go high-end with GPS polling, like freight delivery services use. Then you might have a last known location with which to work. 3G GPS would also be a leg up. It hardly seems worth the expense. Maybe some local freight hauler would piggyback a school district or two onto its subscription. I suspect the benefit won't justify the cost.
Good points. A lost laptop is either not turned on or it's battery is dead by the time it's reported lost. Without a network connection the webcam wouldn't be useful either. It's hard to see how someone would steal a laptop without defeating the webcam concept unless they didn't know about it. It just doesn't seem to me like anyone thought this one through. Even GPS locators have a problem for a lost unit for the same on/battery reason, and in order for it to work on a stolen unit you'd still need some network connection.
The usefulness in capturing stolen laptops is gone once the thief puts a piece of tape over the webcam. I don't see how a truly lost laptop (left in a stored piece of luggage perhaps) would be recovered any faster with a webcam on. I can easily see an administrator with many stolen/lost laptops being inspired to look for their new users over a webcam in an act of desperation.
A GPS or LoJack subscription would be closer to ideal, except this is an extra cost item. Will a school board make the investment? Sometimes. Can you convince the provider to give away the service to educational institutions to make a product more visible in the marketplace? Maybe.
The question of just who might be able to activate the remote camera and under what conditions is important for sure. The problem with something like this is that once remote activation is possible, it's hard to contain the knowledge of how to do it. I've noticed that in some cases when on conference bridges, my own webcam will activate and I have to disable it (if I'm not feeling handsome that day!). There are obviously situations where applications will activate a camera without explicit "permission" from the user, and I recall that students commented that their cameras sometimes activated for no apparent reason.
As I said, though, I think there are two dimensions to the issue here. First there's whether this was a prudent or legal exercise of technology. Then there's the question of whether this sort of thing could hamper the acceptance of telepresence and video in the workplace, for example. In the first large-scale study of virtual presence I know of, conducted among very tech-literate people, the workers would hang clothing over the cameras when they came in each morning because they weren't sure that the darn things were off! I'd like to see webcam vendors tell us all that there is no way their units can activate without the red light coming on, and also I'd like to see a regulation that says you can't mount a camera on a PC or sell an add-on camera that doesn't provide both a positive red warning light when it's on and a means of disabling its use except when it's explicitly activated.
There's no question that consent would have to have been obtained, but I wonder whether even with consent you could activate a remote camera. Suppose the laptop is sitting on a vanity while someone is dressing? You can't consent to be a victim of a crime, and surveillance without legal protections is risky business.
Though I am not sure of the seriousness of laptop theft cases in the school using webcam for surveillance is an atrocious measure on an unsuspecting student. The administration cant let the students do the duty of administrator. And what is the criteria for selecting students who would film their colleagues? Was any code of conduct framed for this purpose and stringently practiced
The whole Amazon.reader debate is a double-stupid. It's stupid to think that there's any e-book buyer who doesn't know Amazon's URL, and it was stupider to let ICANN launch the whole free-form TLD initiative to start with.
Subsidized handsets, rather than locked handsets, should be the focus of regulators. We're not getting good deals, not fostering innovation, and weakening our power as buyers.
50 billion household devices will be on the Internet by 2020, according to Cisco. And we're hearing foreign governments are hacking our infrastructure. Surely our refrigerators are next!
YouTube's move to a partial pay-for-view model could help relieve a dearth of good new content but it could also complicate debates in many parts of the world over payment by content providers for delivery of their material to customers.
That's what Larry Page said on Google's earnings call, referring to the conjunction of mobile and the cloud. Well, let's chart it then! We need to be thinking about an Internet where 90% of our traffic goes to 70 destinations within 40 miles of us.
Facebook's Graph Search may face some profound challenges and risks, first, because Facebook users haven't been thinking of their posts as product reviews; and second, because Facebook will now have to contend with the social-network equivalent of SEO "gaming" of results.
EU operators are considering joining up to create a pan-European network to reduce competitive overbuild and cost. This might lower costs and focus operators on higher-level, more interesting services.
Comparing Internet services is tough because service providers price and market their services based on a best-case scenario connection that most consumers will never enjoy.
Many enterprises view high-speed broadband connections as ubiquitous. Yet in about 20 percent of the country, businesses and their employees do not have access to even DSL connections. This shortcoming diminishes enterprises' ability to support their employees.
Congress is considering a bill to extend a moratorium on Internet regulation changes for two years. But with issues like service quality, cloud performance, and privacy looming, we risk contaminating the Internet with fraud.
The problem with telepresence is that it's not universally accepted, because video calling isn't. While we can all do video calling, we also apparently worry too much about how we look. If we want HD telepresence in our future, we have to dress down, mess up our hair, and dive into our online life.
That's what Larry Page said on Google's earnings call, referring to the conjunction of mobile and the cloud. Well, let's chart it then! We need to be thinking about an Internet where 90% of our traffic goes to 70 destinations within 40 miles of us.
EU operators are considering joining up to create a pan-European network to reduce competitive overbuild and cost. This might lower costs and focus operators on higher-level, more interesting services.
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