An update to the School used student laptop webcams to spy on them at school and home post:
The school district has issued two statements: Statement One Statement Two
Basically the district said the laptops contained a “security-tracking feature” that was only activated to track lost, stolen and missing computers. In these case the feature was limited to “taking a still image of the operator and the operator’s screen.”
That sounds much more plausible. The school district my wife used to work for had the same tech. One of their laptops went missing. When discovered, they turned on the camera and found one of the teacher's own kids using it at her house. oops.