I became aware of this story through an article on The Register – to summarise the facts, a woman bought what turned out to be a stolen laptop, and whilst using it to conduct a certain kind of webchat with her boyfriend, an employee of Absolute Software used previously installed software on the stolen laptop to ‘grab’ several items of data including screenshots of the webchat session.
Even if someone unintentionally using a stolen laptop cannot expect reasonable levels of privacy (and the Judge doesn’t believe that their privacy should have been breached), ordinary human decency should have been enough to exclude the naked pics. Anyone involved in the security world (including IT security) should be aware that anyone using a stolen laptop may well not be the person who stole the laptop and may be guilty of no more than stupidity by buying a stolen laptop.
Such stupidity deserves punishment, but the loss of the laptop is punishment enough – having naked pics of yourself passed around a bunch of geeks and then shown to the police is going just a little too far. And what about the boyfriend ? He didn’t have anything to do with the stolen laptop, so why were Absolute Software stealing naked pics of him?
Once you have a timestamp and a network address of the stolen laptop, that is sufficient in almost all cases to identify who to talk to about the laptop. Grabbing screenshots of a webcam chat is merely prurient voyeurism of the same order of magnitude as setting up network webcams in a shop changing room.
But there is more to this than just the salacious details of the kind of pictures captured. Who owns the data on that laptop ? Well all of the data on the laptop at the time it was stolen surely belongs to the owner of that laptop (unless of course they have been stealing data themselves!), but any data created since then does not. And that surely includes screenshots of what activities are shown on screen.
If Absolute Software had chosen to activate the webcam to grab pictures of the person using the laptop rather than grab screenshots, they would have been on slightly less shaky ground because they would then be creating data and not stealing data. And of course they would not have grabbed a naked pic of an entirely innocent man! However they should also have the decency to ensure that any images they grabbed didn’t contain an ‘unusual’ amount of skin exposed.
Plus of course by grabbing any sort of image from a webcam could put the employees of Absolute Software at risk of creating and viewing child porn – not everyone engaged in ‘adult’ webchats is necessarily over the age of consent!