School starts mass social media surveillance of students for their ‘safety’

  • 1 September 2013
  • 3 replies
  • 905 views

Userlevel 7
Badge +54
A California school district, citing it's for the children's "safety" excuses, hired a company to monitor students' social media posts even when the kids are not on campus.

Glendale Unified School District includes "31 schools and over 2,620 employees, serving 27,000 students in grades Kindergarten through 12th grade." The district is paying $40,500 for Geo Listening to analyze the social media posts of "13,000 students at eight Glendale middle and high schools."

"We do monitor on and off campus," school superintendent Richard Sheehan told CBS Los Angeles, "but we do pay attention during school hours. We do pay more attention to the school computers."

Geo Listening's Privacy Policy states that it monitors Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+, Instagram, Flickr, Picasa, Ask.fm and Vine." The company says it's all very legal and has a prepared answer in case you are wondering, But what about privacy? "The students we can help are already asking for you. All of the individual posts we monitor on social media networks are already made public by the students themselves. Therefore, no privacy is violated." The bold print emphasis was theirs. It "does not monitor email, SMS, MMS, phone calls, voicemails or unlock any privacy setting of a social network user."
 
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I think this is going too far personally.

3 replies

Userlevel 7
There is no more privacy in the world. Once your identity has been entered into the computer world by Forums, Doctors Office, IRS or other websites your private identity is screwed as I see it and it's not going to get any better. Welcome to the computer world!
Userlevel 7
Badge +13
It is quite disturbing and a sad statement on our times.The rights of the common citizen are continually being eroded.We, as citizens, must remember we have the power to change things.All this being said,i have no issue whatsoever with communications being monitored,provided that the laptop,pc is property of the local school district and is on loan to the student for educational purposes only.
Userlevel 5
This is a situation we have gotten ourselves into. People are using things like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc. and afterwards complain about their privacy. it's a backward situation. You should have figured out that you were signing away your privacy the moment you started with such things.
 
It is indeed a sad statement on our times indeed, and it's only looking to get worse before it will get better.

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