you bet your ass it's ok to spy on kids; I made em, i can spy on em (sorry kiddos). the school district on the other hand, is not allowed to venture onto my lawn, much less into my house.
Why would you think you should have unlimited rights to violate their privacy? Parents already don't have an unlimited right to limit their freedom of movement (e.g. locking them up in their room indefinitly) or the right to use any kind of violence against them. (At least that's the case here in Germany, but I would guess that the US are similar.)
The rights of parents are already limited by the rights of their children, I don't see how you can then jump from "I made em" right to "i can spy on em". We also don't jump from "I made em" right to "i can beat em up" or "i can lock em up forever".
I would agree that some spying should be allowed, but not unlimited (similar to freedom of movement). Putting a camera in the bathroom would definitly not be ok. I would also argue that the rights to privacy increase with age. Secret surveillance might be ok for infants (e.g. baby monitor) but most certainly not for seventeen year old teenagers.
The underlying issue here, at least in the U.S., is that as a parent, I'm responsible for anything that happens to my children. Kid misses school, I get in trouble. Kid deals drugs, I can go to jail. Kid has a mental disorder that causes them to be violent and I let them roam free? I am responsible for the consequences. Kid keeps contraband in my car or house? I could lose my car or house to the authorities.
It's highly contextual, sure. I can't beat a kid with a stick because he eats his cereal wrong. But I am expected to restrain my children from hurting themselves, even if that means by using force. I am responsible to control what goes on in my house, even if that conflicts with the idea of increasing freedoms.
In practice, parents give way over time -- the entire idea of parenting is that the child becomes ready to be responsible for these things themselves. But there are lots of edge cases. You can't make blanket statements and have them hold up. That's one of the reasons we have a juvenile court system -- to handle the mixed rights of parents and the children they live with. In general, however, the GP is more correct than not: children do not have rights in the same way an adult does. Just like everybody else with diminished mental capacity, somebody else is responsible for taking care of them, and no matter how you do that, it's going to infringe on what they might of had if they were an adult.
Is the law that different? I know that in Germany it's quite hard to demonstrate that you have claims against the parents if their child damages something. You basically have to demonstrate that the parents really screwed up. If not, you are on your own. In Germany parents are most definitly not responsible for everything their child does.
And I never said that children have or should have the same rights as grown-ups. The law should only reflect that parents do not violate the child's rights without it being necessary and justified. And it does in Germany. I don't know about the US.
(Just one example about parent's responsibilities I remember: If, say, nine year old children damage a parking car on their way home from the playground it's imposible to make them responsible but it's also practically imposible to make their parents responsible. Going alone to and from the playground is, as long as it's not too far from home, a normal activity for nine year olds, their parents did nothing wrong.)
If you need a court system to determine whether it's necessary or justified you are doing something wrong. There is a large prejudice to leaving kids and parents to work out their own problems. Therefore in practice it's all up to parent to determine how everybody's rights are to be balanced. And that's the way it should be -- parents are supposed to be training their children to uphold their values, culture, and lifestyle. This is one of the reasons we have children. The state should only interfere if harm is coming to the child, and having your folks scan your emails or search your room is not harming you at all. (Not that I approve or disapprove of any specific practices. Like I said, it's all very subjective between the kid and parent)
As I said and repeated and really like to repeat here again: children should have limited rights and they actually do have limited rights in Germany. Spying is ok. Reading their E-Mails and going through their drawers is ok. But only up to a point. The parents just cannot limit their rights without limits.
I'm also not really sure why courts should not decide what's necessary and justified. That's all we ever did in our cases in the introductory course on public law and basic rights. (Basic rights in Germany have an influence on how courts have to decide in civil cases - just before anybody says anything about this being only the case in public law, i.e. citizen-state relationships, not citizen-citizen relationships)
I have serious concerns about any parent that decides to routinely and casually invade the privacy of their children by reading their e-mails or tracking their web browsing. Children raised in such an environment are being taught that they should not expect to have privacy and that they should will not be treated as human beings in general. That kind of casual violation is precisely what justifies infractions like those documented in the article.
I think it's actually a good idea to train them to treat the internet as a space without privacy, because it really is. Not sure if reading their emails etc is the way to go about it though.
So you're saying that, in Germany, if a nine-year-old walks home from the playground and decides to pick up a stick and scratch up the paint on my car, and I'm somehow able to find out and prove that this kid did it, I can't hold either the kid or their parents responsible, and have to pay out of my own pocket to get it repaired? That's... retarded.
For one thing parents have been spying on their kids for time immemorial. Also you'll have practically no chance of enforcing a prohibition against parents spying on their own kids.
Unless the courts take the approach that the school is 'in loco parentis' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_loco_parentis), that is they have similar rights to when the kids are under their supervision.
They can claim that since laptops are not tracked via GPS so it is hard to know where the kids are (at home or at school). So they can just brush this off as an 'oops' or demand that all laptops have tracking chips in them. Or they can always blame the sysadmin and just say "we told him to spy only when kids are at school, but he goofed off, so we'll just fire him" basically scapegoating one person.
Now I am not defending them, as this is a completely outrageous violation of so many rights. I am just thinking of what lies they might use in court to justify this.
And where was the IT leader for the school in all of this? This is where professional responsibility has to come into play. He or she has a responsibility to be aware of what's right and wrong, and installing and activating remote spycam software is so very definitely wrong; I don't even have the words.
It is pointless to seek professional responsibity among IT staff when the people who hired them don't have any. Anyone having responsability wouldn't have lasted there anyway.
