Student monitoring: Cyberbullying leads Los Angeles-area school district to spy on students’ Facebook, Twitter
The Glendale Unified School District has begun using the firm Geo Listening to keep track of its students’ social media accounts this school year. The school district, responding to two suicides last year, says the program has so far ‘been working very well.’ But civil rights advocates object, saying it walks a fine line on privacy.
In the age of cyberbullying, a suburban Los Angeles school district is taking a novel approach: It’s paying a company tens of thousands of dollars to snoop on students’ social media pages.
But while officials in Glendale look at the monitoring as a safeguard against bullying, suicide and other alarming behavior, some students and civil rights advocates say the school district is being an unnecessarily nosy Big Brother.
“We all know social media is not a private place, not really a safe place,” Young Cho, a 16-year-old junior at Herbert Hoover High School, told the Los Angeles Times. “But it’s not the same as being in school. It’s students’ expression of their own thoughts and feelings to their friends. For the school to intrude in that area — I understand they can do it, but I don’t think it’s right.”
Glendale Unified School District is paying the firm Geo Listening $40,500 to track posts by its 14,000 or so middle and high school students — scouring their Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other social media accounts that are set to public.
The district approached the Hermosa Beach-based firm in hopes of curtailing online bullying, drug use and other problems after two teenagers committed suicide last year, the Los Angeles Times reported.
A pilot program was first launched last year at the district’s three high schools.
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“We think it’s been working very well,” said school district Superintendent Dick Sheehan. “It’s designed around student safety and making sure kids are protected.”
The company does not have a list of students’ names and instead uses “deductive reasoning” to link public accounts to students, said Geo Listening founder Chris Frydrych. Accounts that are kept private can’t be accessed.
Frydrych told CNN that only students ages 13 or older are part of the sweep — otherwise parental permission is required.
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Geo Listening says it uses keywords to track students’ social media posts, but it’s up to school officials to decide what to do with that information.
The company looks for keywords in online chatter that can alert the school district to potentially harmful actions.
It’s up to administrators to decide to act. Recently, the monitoring found a student who posted a picture online of what appeared to be a gun. The firearm turned out to be a fake.
“We had to educate the student on the dangers” of putting such a photo on the Internet, Sheehan said. “He was a good kid. … It had a good ending.”
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No student, meanwhile, has been disciplined because of a post discovered under the pilot program, Sheehan said.
Still, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union said the district is walking a fine line with its social media surveillance.
The program is “sweeping and far afield of what is necessary to ensure student safety,” said Brendan Hamme, of the ACLU’s Southern California branch.
Another privacy defender said Glendale’s use of a monitor is “essentially hiring a contractor to stalk the social media of the kids.”
“It’s not stumbling into students — like a teacher running across a student on the street,” Lee Tien, senior staff attorney for the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation, told CNN. “This is the school sending someone to watch them.”
With News Wire Services
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