The Glendale, California, school district is spending $40,000 to hire a company to monitor every social media post made by its 14,000 middle school students. The reasoning is that the information can be used to prevent bullying and suicide.
As you might expect, some people are up in the arms about privacy concerns. Considering what just happened in the Joplin School District with Ronny Justin Myers, I am wondering why a school would hire an outside company to watch over student postings- a company whose employees it has no control over. What kind of background checks are done on the company's employees?
Technology has certainly brought a whole new set of problems into education.
The accompanying videos are a basic news report and a Headline News discussion.
3 comments:
Are these postings made on school accounts or personal accounts? If personal, I'd have to sue. We worry about the NSA, but this is far worse. This isn't tracking numbers to possible terrorist strongholds, which was bad enough. This is invading personal space. Like using webcams in people's homes in order to peep. A stand must be taken and a precedence set. If I were a Joplin parent, I'd be telling the district what they could do with those computers.
Personal accounts have another safeguard: to a small time operator like this firm, they're personal unless you give them your login information (user id and password). Which is against every principle of computer security and the Terms of Service of these social networks. Especially since this can be trivially used for ill, for example by sending stuff while pretending to be one of the students.
We're already having issues with would be employers demanding people's Facebook login information, which has led to legislative pushback, and that was before Snowden's NSA revelations. I don't see this sort of privacy invasion getting much traction right now.
If their monitoring is limited to purely public stuff ... I wonder how useful it could be.
The computers are a pain. We hate them. There is always something wrong with them. Books are the same every time you open them. They're cheaper to replace. And they work every where.
If I had money to pay for it I'd toss the one in my house in the nearest source of water. As it is I've covered the camera with tape. This is all just plain stupid. Like the people who did this to us. Stupid.
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