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Teacher's Aide Fired For Refusing To Hand Over Facebook Password
An anonymous reader writes "You can add this one to the short but growing list of employers demanding access to Facebook accounts. After refusing to give her Facebook password to her supervisors, Kimberly Hester was fired by Lewis Cass Intermediate School District from her job as an aide to Frank Squires Elementary in Cassopolis, Michigan. She is now fighting a legal battle with the school district."
Now the ACLU has a case they can use to clarify that it's illegal to do this under current legislation and put a stop to the nonsense.
It's too bad it'll take so long for it to churn through the courts.
Presuming the ACLU, EFF, et. al. don't decide to wait for a "better" case, that is.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Another reason not to "friend" everyone you know. Seriously, if you want to keep personal and work separate, keep it separate! No one I work with is on my facebook.
I don't understand this obsession people have with gaining access to people's Facebook accounts. What is the origin of this craze? Why is it considered acceptable to require from people a Facebook password, but not, say, a Gmail account password?
Even more so, I don't understand this acquiescence to "authority" that many people seem to display; why in the world would you give somebody else your password like this?
Well, this is a public school. They seem to make an artform out of administrative idiocy, whether it's installing spy software on laptops so they can confuse Mike & Ikes with drugs or applying zero tolerance nonsense to activities that take place off school grounds and outside school hours. They make it a point to stick their nose in where it doesn't belong.
Sure, students are largely the victims of this crap, but teachers and administrators occasionally get this crap splattered on them too.
Program Intellivision!
"Oh just think of the children!"
What the teacher does outside of school is none of the school's business.
If the teacher is stupid enough to friend her pupils, then he/she is going to find themselves in trouble. Teachers are by definition in a position of authority over their class, and they shouldn't be seen as a friend. Mentor perhaps - someone the kids can turn to if the going gets tough - but never a friend in the truest sense of the word.
If that is the way it is in classrooms these days - no wonder there's no discipline amongst school kids.
It is well understood that you give up some of your privacy and rights on a school campus.
Only in your head. In the real world, and a supposedly free country, your rights to privacy (in your personal life) never cease to exist anywhere.
The fact she posted it from home is irrelevant. She was on campus when a supervisor asked her for her password.
Bullshit. 1,000,000% relevant. If I am at work, on corporate equipment, I have no rights to privacy as long as I am performing work in accordance with my job. That's reasonable. Once I am off the clock, at home, using my own equipment (that I paid for), nobody can claim a "right" to invade my privacy.
What if this teacher had candid photos of children on their page? Or worse.
Ohhh, Golly Gee Willickers!!!! I had not thought about that!!!
Of course, I see it now. Think of the children! I forgot about that. Let's suspend Freedom, Liberty, and all that happy crap right away to protect them....
I couldn't care lesss... I wouldn't even care if my childrens teacher was a pornstar on the side... The only ones I wouldn't want teaching my children were religious people that deny science/evolution or people in hategroups.
I don't want my daughter's teacher to post such profane content on her FB page without repercussions. It is well understood that you give up some of your privacy and rights on a school campus. The fact she posted it from home is irrelevant. She was on campus when a supervisor asked her for her password. The supervisor had reasonable cause to suspect inappropriate content in this woman's FB account and sought rightfully to check it out. It is part of their responsibility to protect our children. What if this teacher had candid photos of children on their page? Or worse.
I am thankful that, given your incredibly moronic and misguided view of freedom of speech and expression, that we, in the US, at least have a modicum of excellent case law, e.g., Spanierman v. Hughes et al., to provide some protection for teachers from horrendous individuals like yourself.
ZT is idiotic, in my opinion. Sure, when you allow human judgment into the picture, you also allow for biases and selective enforcement. Those are both problems, and I would be wrong to argue otherwise. ZT, though, leads to suspensions and arrests ibuprofen to school, or suspending first graders for bringing Cub Scouts gear to school.
The policies themselves were not designed with ZT in mind. The policies are human-designed, and intended to be applied by humans, with human reasoning, to human situations. ZT effectively turns them into hard computer programs without actually requiring the policies to be fully elaborated to account for all the extenuating circumstances under which they might be applied. I argue that in most cases, that simply isn't possible. At the very least, it is very far from likely unless you spend considerable effort. If it were easy, we wouldn't have a court system (complete with appellate courts).
And, it doesn't even save you from capriciousness. Instead it leads you to amplify the whims of children. For example, in one of the links above, the student was "caught" because some other kid claimed she had a knife. The likelihood someone gets ratted out (and thus subjected to the worst effects of ZT) varies based on the attitudes and decisions of the fellow classmates, not the now supposedly immune administrators. That just sets the system up for worse outcomes, because a big lever of the system (detection/reporting) is left to the kids, and enforcement is automatic and uncontrolled.
Furthermore, if an administrator does notice something punishable, but lets it slide silently because nobody else notices, who would know? ZT only applies once its obvious to everyone that there's an infraction. The system isn't even airtight at that level, since the decision to let something slide undetected is an individual decision on the part of that administrator, and they can later claim (usually) to not have noticed the infraction.
Explain to me again how the sliver of legal protection offered by ZT isn't idiocy compared to these awful, stupid outcomes?
Program Intellivision!
Sorry, but that last part was so ridiculous it barely deserved an answer at all.
Candid photos? Seriously? "Or Worse"? That implies there is something wrong with candid photos of children. It further implies that my own parents are evil pedophiles simply because they have a picture of me naked in the tub at 3 years old in a photo album, that could actually be picked up by a guest in the house!
It's that kind of retarded sentiment from parents that want teachers thrown in jail for reading a sci-fi book out loud, the word dinosaur removed from tests because there can be emotions associated with the "controversy" of evolution that are part of a serious problem in this country that only keeps growing.
Those people honestly believe in suspending freedoms to shove their own hysterical beliefs down our throats. That AC was no better than a member of the Taliban, and I am sure we could get some of the very same statements out them to justify their own behavior.
Asking for passwords and going on witch hunts in every single teacher's personal lives on a regular basis is just a step forward to the time in which we bring them out to the basketball courts and hang them during assembly for "crimes against morality".
Is FB going to ban the supervisor (if s/he has an account on FB) for breach of the terms of service? That could be an effective deterrent.
Being banned from Facebook is an honor. If they want an effective deterrent then what they want to do is have the woman find out if the school took passwords from any other employees, then verify that these were used. At that point you have an unauthorized computer access for which there are serious laws with serious jail time. Throw the book at whichever members of the school conspired to make those illegal computer accesses.
If you or I accessed a girlfriend's account you would get into serious trouble. If Facebook doesn't make sure the same happens here, they are failing in their duty to use all reasonable means available to protect the integrity of their user's accounts.
N.B. Under section 4 point 8 of Facebook's terms of service, other members of staff are not allowed to hand over their passwords, so the access remains unauthorized even if they agreed to it.
4 Registration and Account Security
Facebook users provide their real names and information, and we need your help to keep it that way. Here are some commitments you make to us relating to registering and maintaining the security of your account:
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
And how does this matter to you or your child? I know your answer will be "she is a teacher so.." but that does not explain how this should matter to you or your child. If you think the only people taking pictures of co workers or them drinking a beer is the few you find on facebook you are NOT living in reality. Your current co workers right now next to in the office are the same way. There are people that work in your office now that are swingers, into S&M, do some illegal drugs,sneak looks into their neighbors bedroom, are bipolar, have deep emotional problems, eat toilet paper, in huge debt, gambling problems, cleptomanics so on and so forth. You don't know a lot of this because those actions have nothing to do with what they are doing in their job with you around and it does not effect and yo don't notice it. Why do you think teachers are any different? If everything everyone did public and private became was 100% public, this world would be a much different place for a while and eventually everyone would realize it just didn't matter because everyone has and does things that others would consider strange. People and teachers have been doing strange things for decades. You finding out about it on Facebook means nothing.