It was bad, and horrible IT, but that wasn't its intended purpose and the kid who sued the district was specifically tracked because he had taken the laptop from school without approval. They were 1:1 MacBook deployments that were to remain on campus unless the students had paid a deposit to be able to take them off campus. This student had not, so they enabled the LANrev theft tracking software.

It went off the rails because a) they never informed students and parents of the theft tracking policy and b) instead of just one remote capture to verify the location of the laptop and who was in possession to be able to discipline the student for taking the MacBook home, they decided to continuously monitor the student via constant 15-minute iSight captures and sat there watching. The question is what were they expecting to find beyond confirming he had indeed taken the laptop? It seems like the VP was out to get him for something and was waiting for criminal activity to be captured so they could really stick it to the student. IT should've known better and told the VP to deal with it.