Schools Are Helping Police Spy On Kids' Social Media Activity (orlandosentinel.com)

schwit1 shares this excerpt from an article in The Washington Post: Schools in Florida are renewing a program that monitors their students' social media activity for criminal or threatening behavior, although it has caused some controversy since its adoption last year. The school system in Orange County, where Orlando is located, recently told the Orlando Sentinel that the program, which partners the school system with local police departments, has been successful in protecting students' safety, saying that it led to 12 police investigations in the past year. The school district says it will pay about $18,000 annually for SnapTrends, the monitoring software used to check students' activity. It's the same software used by police in Racine, Wisconsin, to track criminal activity and joins a slew of similar social media monitoring software used by law enforcement to keep an eye on the community.

SnapTrends collects data from public posts on students' social media accounts by scanning for keywords that signify cases of cyberbullying, suicide threats, or criminal activity. School security staff then comb through flagged posts and alert police when they see fit.

Comments

Re:So long as it is PUBLIC posts... meh...

[ShanghaiBill]

The problem is that school security, and the police, can interrogate students under coercion.

Not legally.

Students in a situation like that don't have a right to a lawyer

Yes they do. They also have a right to demand that their parents be present during questioning.

The problem here is not the rights, but knowledge of those rights. If you have teenage kids, you need to teach them their legal rights. Have them watch the Do Not Talk to the Police video. If you kid is questioned by the police, they should be trained to say exactly four words:

1. I
2. Want
3. My
4. Parents

Once they say those four words, the police are legally obligated to stop questioning them until their parents are present.