CA District Announces Round-The-Clock Monitoring Of Its 13,000 Students' Social Media activities

[n2doc]

The Glendale School District in California is facing some backlash from the recent news that it has retained the services of Geo Listening to track its students' social media activity. The rationale behind the program is (of course) the students' safety.

After collecting information from students' posts on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter, Geo Listening will provide Glendale school officials with a daily report that categorizes posts by their frequency and how they relate to cyber-bullying, harm, hate, despair, substance abuse, vandalism and truancy.

Glendale Unified, which piloted the service at Hoover, Glendale and Crescenta Valley high schools last year, will pay the company $40,500 to monitor posts made by about 13,000 middle school and high school students at eight Glendale schools.

It would appear that the school district knew there would be some backlash, hence its decision to delay this announcement until the beginning of this school year, rather than "last year," when the program was actually put into place. (The date stated in this article may be incorrect. The founder of Geo Listening's LinkedIn page says the company formed in January -- unless "last year" means "last school year.&quot Administration officials are already on the defensive.

more

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130902/13154624384/ca-school-district-announces-its-doing-round-the-clock-monitoring-its-13000-students-social-media-activities.shtml

I thought schools were strapped for cash?

[Nuclear Unicorn]

1. Moralizing busbodies and pedophiles endorsed the decision.

[dixiegrrrrl]

2. Be interesting to see how many parents bother to object.

The idea of schools spying on students, at any age, should have created a HUGE roar of outrage.
Big Brother is taking over, step by step. How many will even notice, I wonder....

[arcane1]

4. And how many of those students have public profiles, too?

They could solve the issue with a few tweaks of their privacy settings, unless this system is a way to get around that. But generally it seems the younger a person is, the less they care about privacy

[dixiegrrrrl]

7. First thing I would teach my kid

is how to avoid giving out any social media passwords and other info. to school admin.
Or any other info. the school has no business knowing.

The younger a person is, the less they understand about the need for privacy, I think.
Takes 5 minutes for a parent to explain it to them.

[BuelahWitch]

3. Yuck, don't like this

It sets a really bad precedent.

[wavesofeuphoria]

5. I like this point made in the article ...

"Just because it's been created doesn't automatically mean it should be collected." ... referring to social data ... I think that holds as well for the NSA and Data collecting and mining.

[Trillo]

6. So, how many credits toward graduation does this "testing" provide?

Because school hours of 6 hours a day or so has now been expanded to many more hours of "testing" each day.

Should kids now be able to graduate by the time they're 12-years of age, due to the extra "homework" that's being collected from them?