Slashdot Mirror
California School District Hires Firm To Monitor Students' Social Media
An anonymous reader writes "A suburban Los Angeles school district is taking a novel approach to tackling the problem of cyber-bullying. It's paying a company to snoop on students' social media pages. 'The district in Glendale, California, is paying $40,500 to a firm to monitor and report on 14,000 middle and high school students' posts on Twitter, Facebook and other social media for one year. Though critics liken the monitoring to government stalking, school officials and their contractor say the purpose is student safety. As classes began this fall, the district awarded the contract after it earlier paid the firm, Geo Listening, $5,000 last spring to conduct a pilot project monitoring 9,000 students at three high schools and a middle school. Among the results was a successful intervention with a student "who was speaking of ending his life" on his social media, said Chris Frydrych, CEO of the firm.'"
Probably the same way that the US Navy got my contact information to harass me when I was in high school. The school just gets authority to collect it and to hell with your wishes. Compared with the years of harassment and insults from the jack asses at the Navy, this is of somewhat lesser concern.
But, it's still a concern, the last thing we need is to condition kids to think that it's normal for schools to spy on your behavior outside of school hours.
And how does the school district get the student account information?
1. Create a fake account using the picture of a really cute 16 year old girl claiming to be new at the school.
2. Request to friend a few boys. 99% of them will accept.
3. Follow the friends of friends network to connect to everyone else.
In a few days, you should have every student with a Facebook account. My daughter is in high school. She has over 600 Facebook friends, and she will just automatically accept any friend request from any other student at her school. I think this is pretty typical for HS students.