Orange County Public Schools To Monitor Students On Social Media

The Orlando Sentinel reports that Orange County, Florida, is undertaking a sweeping effort to snoop on the social media communications of the county's public school students and staff, for the nebulous task of "[ensuring] safe school operations," and say they will use the software (at a license cost of about $13,000 per year) "to conduct routine monitoring for purposes of prevention or early intervention of potential issues where students or staff could be at risk to themselves or to others." The software they're using is from Snaptrends, which offers "location-based social media discovery." According to one of the comments attached to the linked story, there are monthly fees, in addition to the annual licensing cost.

Comments

Private Profiles

[D.McG.]

Anyone with a clue makes their profile private such that only friends may see their posts. Most children are told explicitly to do this by parents because of creepy stalkers. These clowns are actually receiving/spending tax payer's money to stalk. Illegal on so many levels.

Re:Private Profiles

[negRo_slim]

Anyone with a clue doesn't use a site whose sole purpose is to datamine your ass. When will people begin to understand that Facebook is the enemy?

Here, we have the nanny state stepping in, and Facebook cooperates fully. Facebook does nothing to block trackers, in fact, they ENCOURAGE trackers! I'm sure that Facebook is getting some kind of financial incentive for cooperating. If government doesn't offer incentives directly, then the companies like Snaptrends is passing it on.

Well some of us live in the real world and can't just hide under a rock because, ya know, we need to interact with people for personal and professional reasons via popular social media sites.

Re: Private Profiles

[Anonymous Coward]

People like you are the problem. FB profiles are hardly appropriate for professionals. Email and a proper website shows that you care about running a business. Plus I see a ton of companies using fb to encourage people to spam friends for rewards.

This isn't living under a rock, it's realizing that living in a glass house has no advantages for us.

Re:Private Profiles

[FatdogHaiku]

Bah! It's not serious until you can stash a whole bag of Cheetos in it... and if you can do it without taking them out of the bag you are an honorary member of ZZ Top!

Re:Private Profiles

[Dutch Gun]

Absolutely. Still, this will teach students a valuable life lesson. Prospective employers are probably going to pull the same sort of nonsense, so they had better start learning to watch what they say in public right now.

Also... I'm obviously building the wrong type of software. I'd love to be able to charge $13K plus monthly usage fees for scanning targeted people on Facebook, Twitter, and a few other services for scary keywords and phrases.

Re:Private Profiles

[Dutch Gun]

No, specialized software for niche audiences like government agencies (say, city administration or police departments) tends to cost that much, simply because they're selling to thousands, not millions (source: a relative who works in a small city IT dept).

From what I understand, Facebook doesn't give anyone else the keys to users private data. Besides which, it's really not in their best interest to do so, financially speaking. They'll sell advertising rights to anonymized groups based on profile data, but they'll never hand over the personalized data. Google is the same way. What they do is allow the advertisers to pick specific demographics, such as sex, age, marital status, general location, hobbies, and so forth. However, it's all anonymized, meaning the advertisers don't know which specific people they are advertising to, only the group demographics.

Re:Private Profiles

[Ol Olsoc]

Well some of us live in the real world and can't just hide under a rock because, ya know, we need to interact with people for personal and professional reasons via popular social media sites.

This might be the most bizzaro statement ever issued on Slashdot. Exactly and totally wrong.

Allow Ol to educate you. Facebook, is not the real world. Really, it isn't. Real world is meeting people face to face, doing things with them, kind of experiencing life. It's not old fashioned to avoid Facebook, it isn't being a luddite. Avoiding Facebook is the same as avoiding crystal meth.

This is you. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Re:Private Profiles

[Sique]

In most of the EU states, mining data on people and putting it in a database without the expressively given consent by each of the people in question is illegal, even if the data sources are publicly available.

So yes, even credit rating agencies are only allowed to process data the person in question has allowed. Most contracts which are related to credits like mobile phone planes or opening a banking account thus contain wordings regarding the cooperation with credit rating agencies.

Re: Private Profiles

[soundguy4film]

Private social media is impossible. It's not social if it's private.

if you dont want people

[ganjadude]

if you dont want people to know what you are doing.... dont post it online for the world to see! is it really that hard???

My question is where is the money coming from to pay for this? i want my teachers teaching, not spying

Re:if you dont want people

[ColdWetDog]

No, you (presumably) want the teachers to be teaching. Not being their parents.

That ship sailed long ago. That said, GODDAMMIT; '1984' WAS SUPPOSED TO BE A WARNING. NOT AN OPERATIONS MANUAL.

Re:if you dont want people

[CaptainDork]

Expecting students not to post is unrealistic.

What IS realistic is to expect most students to use social media to spread the word on how to avoid this particular snooping method.

Re:if you dont want people

[KGIII]

My favorite bumper sticker:

It will be great when schools have all the funds they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy another bomber.

Re:if you dont want people

[Hasaf]

As a teacher, I can tell you that many people expect the teacher to be "spying." I cannot tell you how many of the "good" parents say things like "I am trusting you to tell me if anything tithe [student name] seems wrong." The other parents just get angry post hoc if the school does not see something in advance.

As if I, a person who sees your kid for five hours a week am going to have greater insight than the people that live with the kid. If I do have some insight, something unseen by the students family, it is more of an indictment of the lack of attentiveness of family than any great slur thing on my part. Yes, I have students who come to my classroom after school; because, for various reasons, it is easier than going home (also because I encourage use of the lego 'bots, programming "club", and other toys after school; I have too many students too be "fun" in class. In class I am the, grumpy, crazy drill sergeant.).

One reason I like these articles is that I do share this stuff with my students (I teach computer apps & introduction to computer technology, it fits my curriculum quite well). I talk to, and with (two different concepts there), then about valuing their privacy and the threats to it. What would surprise many is the percentage of them that just don't care.

Finally

[houghi]

I am so glad they finally are doing what everybody is asking for. We hear a lot of complaining that all schools do is learn people to take tests. And now finally we prepare students for the real world.
. . . . . . . . .

Orange County parent groups to ...

[tlambert]

Orange County parent groups to monitor Orange County Public Schools Monitoring Students On Social Media.

Do As I Say, Not, As I Do....

Anonymous is watching...

Oh, that Orange County

[techno-vampire]

There are eight different Orange Counties in the US, in different states, along with one in China, about an hour north of Beijing. I'm glad to know that this is the one in Florida, not the one near where I live.

Re:Oh, that Orange County

[sumdumass]

Yes, you certainly have not tried to make make it secrete and it would have been considerably harder if you tried but not impossible because you are somewhat successful in life. Well, what i would consider successful anyways.

I was just wanting to make a point. I live about 3000 miles from you (no, not in florida either..lol.) and have no desire to go to jail over someone i don't even know so don't take anything i've done as a threat or anything. Government already collects substantial amounts of information and this data mining isn't limited to backwards idiots far away from us. It's right in our backyards sometimes without us even realizing it. Kids most of all probably do not understand just how much information they are giving away. Even well educated and successful adults don't realize it sometimes. Its even worse when you understand espionage tactics and information/inteligence gathering. The US army had a bunch of training films during WWII about how this is done. I foget the nae of the series, but it was three or four films long about interrogating prisoners who didn't say anything obvious but gave all sorts of information away. At the end, it listed all the information gathered and it was obvious how it was gathered in hindsight but completely obfuscated it practice. This is what happens with online presence being so persistent and accessible. Schools or government datamining social media should be scary even if we don't think we are doing anything wrong/illegal.

The key assumption are

[Registered Coward v2]

1. They can accurately identify students and staff. Since no one has ever created a fake social media account that shouldn't be hard. Just require everyone to provide a list of all their accounts. No one would object to that, correct?

2. Software can accurately parse potential threat from random uses of keywords and not require excessive reviews of material that is innocuous.

3. No one would create fake accounts to cause #2 to occur.

4. No one will object nor have the cash to hire a lawyer if the school demands account information under threat of punishment.

Re:The key assumption are

[cascadingstylesheet]

I guess the question is how do they determine location? If it simply by where you say you are then the software would depend on people accurately entering their location? Geo staged photos? Not hard to fake. I do not know how you extract location data from Facebook. Maybe Facebook sells the data to the software provider so they get accurate data based on FB ability to ID locations? I know sone services use IP addresses which my VPN easily confuses.

Based of what Facebook periodically asks me (I have not provided them a location) Facebook themselves make content based guesses on your "where you live" location, even though they obviously have your IP address.

Someone else can use public Facebook data and do the same thing. Will the guesses be perfect? No. Will they be good enough for squishy data aggregation, probably.

Re:Sounds cheap if it works

[penix1]

Of course, this WILL rapidly degenerate into "Deidre got detention because she posted a selfie on Instagram with a really revealing outfit."

FTFY....

So the school officials need to have plenty of common sense.

No... The schools need to be treated like the government entities they are and get the shit sued out of them for violating the Constitution's 4th and 5th Amendment rights. Think of the children only goes so far. But given the shithead fossils we got for a Supreme Court, it wouldn't surprise me if they uphold this shit.

Good

[jbmartin6]

The school is doing its job. Is there a better way to educate students about the value and practice of privacy?

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

In my experience as a teacher, "early intervention of potential issues" just means that kids are going to be suspended or expelled by some smug, power-tripping asshole in administration. Suspensions rarely -- if ever -- have a positive impact on a troubled child. Nobody is going to learn a lesson on the value of privacy; you're just going to end up with a bunch of resentful students who hate school even more.

Hacking the school through social media

[kbsoftware]

This would be a great opportunity for students to expose Orange County School Board's stupidity by figuring how to hack the entire system by what they post on their social media pages. They would be doing nothing illegal and it would make the entire system being used by the school board a joke. I bet by trial and error they could figure it out. For those who are a bit slow I do not mean hacking the software of the school boards system directly. But posting weird message that maybe individually does nothing but as a group would always set off the monitoring software.

Re:Suicide is a real problem

[epyT-R]

Fine. Then find and fix the core causes instead of adding to the oppression that drives kids to such extremes. Of course, this would require the school to accept some fault and fix its authoritarian culture.