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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.
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.
I have to say, if it is public posts, what's the problem?
Is this any different to kids saying stuff out loud in the real world, being overheard, and someone reporting it to the authorities?
Now, if it was PRIVATE posts, holy crap I've have an issue with that. That would be no different to installing microphones on the kids and recording private conversations in their homes.
The school district says it will pay about $18,000 annually for SnapTrends
I guess this is really a great thing since the school district has all that excess money that they can't find a use for.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
True, but if your goal is to change where the money goes, that isn't the place to start... :)
I fully support hiring more teachers and reducing class sizes, providing them with the tools to do their jobs.
Of course, I also support being able to fire teachers that can't cut the mustard.
Our public school district here simply sends the kids home with iPads with pre-installed spyware. I've even seen the camera light turn on out of the blue. The new rule is when my little girl isn't doing homework, the hard cover is put on it and it gets stuffed in the bookbag. And she's not to do any web browsing on it that isn't school related.
For her personal stuff she has a desktop PC and an Asus Transformer. This is actually an interesting life lesson. It's good to treat work-issued devices as spy hardware and not put personal things on them when she grows up as well.
I'd just tell the school where to shove their iPad but if she doesn't use it they issue twice as much written homework and make it harder for her to participate in class. What I'd like to know is why the school system thinks they have a right to spy on my child after school hours.
If the camera light has come on then it is time to accuse the district of kiddie porn. With the current environment, the burden of proof will be on them and with, at least, one district having already been nailed on this issue, it will likely lead to policy changes. The camera on the device, in this context, is supposed to be used only to locate the device if it is reported stolen. If they are capturing pictures of someone under the age of 18 using the device, then there can only be one purpose, at least as far as the public is concerned.
"Be particularly skeptical when presented with evidence confirming what you already believe." -
I would also add that kids have to learn that anything that is done on a school network or computer is not private.
If they were monitoring the school networks and computers, that would be one thing, but this goes far beyond that. That software is designed to monitor the public social media feeds of the students outside of school. This by itself is not what I object to. After all, some school officials and some parents are probably doing some of that monitoring already, and since these are public posts, it's not like students can complain.
What I am concerned with however is that school staff are rarely a neutral party when it comes the speech of their students. Because let's not fool ourselves, the primary reason school officials are searching through social media posts is to look for their own names first, the second thing they look for are videos of themselves (just in case a student recorded them losing it in front of students), and the third thing they look for is anything that might paint their school in a potential negative light. And of course, I am sure that cyberbullying, suicide signs, and other warning signs, are things that they'll look for as well, but in my opinion that's a distant 4th, 5th, and 6th priority for them.
And so if the school is going to spend 18k a year on this stuff, I don't think they should be the ones doing it. They're not capable of being impartial observers. And if a dean really wants to monitor his own/her own reputation online, he/she should be doing it on her own dime and outside of working hours. And as to the safety issue, I do believe that parents, other kids, the general public, tattle tales, and law enforcement authorities, are still going to be the best and quickest sources of information when something bad publicly crops up on the internet.
I would like to be living in the world that you believe exists.
In many of the cases in news reports of student disciplinary actions that led to criminal charges, students were not allowed to contact their parents, were not informed of the right to have a lawyer, and in fact didn't have a right to a lawyer.
That's true even for college students. https://www.thefire.org/fire-g...
There was a court ruling in North Carolina which gave high school students limited constitutional rights in disciplinary hearings. http://tharringtonsmith.com/st... The significant points are (1) Up to that case, they didn't have constitutional rights (2) That case only applies in North Carolina (3) The rights are still limited. Students still don't have a right to a lawyer at most parts of the disciplinary process.
If you want to look it up, Emily Yoffe was writing in Slate about sex abuse charges. In one case, a student got a Skype call over the summer about an accusation he knew nothing about. It was basically an ambush hearing. He said that he thought that he should get a lawyer first. The university official running the hearing said that if he didn't participate in the hearing, they would make their decision without his input.