CA School District Announces It's Doing Round-The-Clock Monitoring Of Its 13,000 Students' Social Media Activities
from the incarcerating-13,000-students-would-make-them-'safer' dept
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.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.") Administration officials are already on the defensive.
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.
Glendale Unified Supt. Dick Sheehan said the service gives the district another opportunity to "go above and beyond" when dealing with students' safety.A rather overwrought paragraph on the company's About Us page attempts to sell fear and monitoring system at the same time, much as Superintendent Sheehan did in the above paragraph.
"People are always looking to see what we're doing to ensure that their kids are safe. This just gives us another opportunity to ensure the kids are safe at all times," he said.
The FactsWhat Geo Listening appears to do is nothing more than aggregate public social media posts linked to either the students or school district. Geo Listening repeatedly points out that it doesn't "monitor email, SMS, MMS, phone calls, voicemails or unlock any privacy setting of a social network user."
Your students are crying for help. We have heard these cries of despair, and for help and attention, loud and clear from students themselves via their public postings on social networks. Many feel as though no one is listening, and they are falling away from societal connections. This trend can be reversed with more timely information that we can provide to the appropriate school staff.
This seems to be true, but not necessarily because Geo Listening is concerned about privacy. In its privacy policy, it breaks down exactly what it does monitor.
Geo Listening is a social media monitoring system that allows school districts to locate and process publicly available social media content. School districts use the Geo Listening Services to access and aggregate publicly available content on the Internet into regular reports and dashboards. Public content is collected and provided to school districts from the following websites:By monitoring only public posts on social media services, Geo Listening is able to provide the district with reports on 13,000 students. Without having access to a report, it's tough to say exactly what Geo Listening is turning over to the district. Here's what it says it's looking for:
· Twitter;
· Facebook;
· Instagram;
· Picasa;
· Vine;
· Flickr;
· Ask.fm;
· YouTube; and
· Google+.
Geo Listening provides social media monitoring services (“Geo Listening Services”) that enable school districts to locate and process publicly available information about their students for the purposes of combating bullying, cyber-bullying, hate and shaming activities, depression, harm and self harm, self hate and suicide, crime, vandalism, substance abuse and truancy.There are some very broad terms in that list and without more information on how Geo Listening tracks or aggregates posts that fall into this very wide net, it looks as though the system is apt to produce a lot of false positives.
Then there's the question about how it searches for offending posts. Does it only run current students through its digital sifter or does it include anyone who lists a Glendale school on their profile? Does this dragnet also capture comments, tweets, etc. from non-students who interact with Glendale students? If a student interacts with a non-student's post that falls afoul of the guidelines, can they be punished? These are just a few of the many questions this monitoring service raises.
Beyond that, there's the fact that the service, as it's currently implemented, is incredibly easy to circumvent, something Geo Location's site even discusses in its privacy policy.
How to Opt OutIt would seem that stating this openly somewhat defeats the purpose of the program, but it does give Geo Listening a pretty strong defense against privacy violations. Geo Listening, however, seems fairly confident that most students won't "opt out," according to this answer in its FAQ.
If you would like to ensure content that you post through a social media platform or profile is not monitored by Geo Listening, you should ensure that your social media posts are non-public. Geo Listening only collects publicly available information. Therefore, if a social media platform includes settings that allow you to designate your posts as private, doing so will ensure your posts will not be collected.
Most users below the age of 25 do not utilize the available privacy settings because they are seeking to be recognized for their respective posts. They have chosen to post in the public domain in exchange for popularity and a decreasing ability to communicate effectively face to face.Personally, I feel Geo Listening is underestimating the teens it's monitoring and the little dig it throws in during the last sentence is unseemly. Insulting the people you're spying on is the sort of thing that comes back to haunt you.
Geo Listening doesn't address one of the biggest flaws in its system anywhere in its statements: trolling. Once students realize their public posts are being monitored, they're likely to respond with deliberately objectionable statements in order to trigger a response from the school system. Once this starts happening with any frequency, it will be much harder to separate the legitimate problems from the fake, while also providing legitimate bullies with a handy excuse.
Then there's the fact that the monitoring makes no distinction between posts made at school (where the school should presumably have some sort of say, especially if these are made using school equipment) and those made outside of school, away from the school's jurisdiction. Some will argue that the type of behavior being monitored crosses both boundaries and therefore should be the concern of the school. But opening this door will lead to more monitoring of kids' (theoretically) private lives rather than what should actually be under the school's purview.
Also of some concern is Geo Listening's mobile app, which basically turns any phone possessed by a student, parent or school staff member into a "Report" button.
Geo Listening also provides a free mobile application to each respective school's parents, students and staff. This mobile application provides each stakeholder the ability to anonymously report incidents that are experienced or witnessed.While having an easy way to collect anonymous tips on incidents of bullying is a theoretically good idea, in practice it often just becomes another avenue of abuse. The district may have thought it was offloading something it didn't have the time and resources for (monitoring students' social network use 24/7) to a third party, but the exploitable flaws in the system indicate a significant amount of investigative and followup work will be generated -- all of which will have to be handled by school administrators.
If administrators are sluggish in their response to reported issues, it will give the appearance that they only really care about appearing to do something, rather than actually doing something. And Geo Listening's rationale ("only public posts") for tracking students off-campus isn't really that much different than the FBI, NSA, et al abusing the Third Party Doctrine in order to hoover up huge amounts of metadata. Just because it's been created doesn't automatically mean it should be collected.
It's another bad administrative decision based on an impossibility (keeping children safe "all the time"), one that's likely to hurt the school in the long run. Unfortunately, this news has attracted the attention of another California school district, one which obviously hasn't read the comments attached to the dozens of stories about the monitoring system.
Burbank’s schools chief said she plans to keep an eye on neighboring Glendale Unified, who recently hired a Hermosa Beach-based company to monitor the public social networking accounts of its middle and high school students.No one "keeps an eye" on something like this unless they think it's a good idea, but just need some additional justification or a lower bidder. Officials don't "keep an eye" on ideas they've dismissed out of hand as being "terrible" or "not for us." The expectation of privacy as it pertains to public posts is very limited, but as diminished as it is, it's not completely unwarranted for the student body to feel they should be able to leave campus without the school following it around and reading its posts over its shoulder.
“We do not currently monitor students’ social media sites and we have not yet researched the program that Glendale Unified has implemented, but we will be gathering more information,” Burbank Unified Supt. Jan Britz said in an email Thursday.
[More excellent posts on the same subject at Free Range Kids and Popehat.]
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Filed Under: california, monitoring, social media
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people who don't use such networks
Do they assume that individual is hiding something? using fake detaisl to avoid monitoring or can they just accept that in some cases they literally have nothing to report? would the 'authorities' accept that as true?
Have come across people who assume that the stated lack of an arsebook profile is evidence of either lying (as 'everyone' has one) or evidence of hiding something, seemingly unable to accept that there are a few people out there with better things to waste time on.
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Re: people who don't use such networks
Yes, well, keep in mind that you're dealing with inferior people equipped with inferior minds there: they presume that just because they're stupid enough to join facebook et.al. that everyone else is equally stupid. It never penetrates their dim consciousness that superior people don't do such things, therefore -- as you say -- they presume that those who don't are lying.
These are the same ignorant, vapid pissants who whine about "cyberbullying" (there is no such thing) and shell out tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars to "social media monitoring companies" who probably wrote a perl script to coalesce RSS feeds and push them through a keyword filter.
This would all be very amusing except the predictable outcome of this -- which everyone on TD should know by now -- is that (a) students who engage in free speech, political activism, creative writing, scientific enquiry, etc. will be targeted for destruction and (b) students who engage in rape, theft, vandalism, etc. will slide right on by. The school district officials will engage in a circlejerk round of self-congratulations, hand out awards to each other, spend MORE taxpayer money on worthless tripe, and continue on, happily doing their best to weed out the best and brightest. The company will proclaim this a success story and hoodwink other school districts into doing the same. Gullible reporters will do their stenographic best, recycling press releases into "news stories" (I know, it's so quaint to think that newspapers should do research) and promoting the meme that Our School Districts Keep Our Kids Safe. Yay!
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Re: Re: people who don't use such networks
where's your facebook page so i can 'like' it ? ? ?
hee hee hee
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Re: Re: people who don't use such networks
This is the only part of your post I'm not sure I agree with. I think this product is much more "low hanging fruit with a well-targeted marketing campaign designed to play on the fears of people in specific positions". Geo Listening are not dumb. They've made a product that they predicted a market for, and they were right. Unless they're lying about something I'd say they were smart. If you can turn writing "a perl script to coalesce RSS feeds and push them through a keyword filter" into large government contracts, good for you. Stupid for the school board and the taxpayers, but good for you. The rest of your post is spot on.
The test of this program (not Geo Listening, but the entire program as instituted by the school board) will be how they respond to the grey area posts and the things require sensitive handling (e.g. depression and suicidal posts).
As you say, given their approach to date, I'd hazard the odds are not good.
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Re: people who don't use such networks
It's like the sham that is psychiatry in general. Any interesting personality trait is considered a disease worthy of being listed in the DSM-IV.
In either case, you are damned for lack of conformity.
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Re: Re: Re: people who don't use such networks
This program is costing a lot of taxpayer money. The test for it is what good will it do? After a year taxpayers will have spent x dollars. So exactly what did they get in return? Will there be examples of suicides prevented because of this? Will there be examples of fights or maybe a Columbine or something being prevented? Will there be any concrete examples of any good coming out of this to justify the taxpayer cost? Doubtful. As taxpayers we should be informed about what exactly we are getting in return for our money.
Why aren't schools being held accountable for wasting taxpayer money on something that, at the end of the day, they have nothing to show for?
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Re: Re: Re: Re: people who don't use such networks
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Re: Re: people who don't use such networks
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Re: people who don't use such networks
If this company is just bulk-gathering "public" information you can be sure there's no clause in the contract that it will ONLY go to the school. They're almost certainly getting paid twice for it.
This isn't about safety. Obviously.
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/s
After hours should be off limits to everyone except the parents. They just want to snoop on kids which is pretty fucking sick if you ask me.
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Re:
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Re: Re:
otherwise, it was a heaping helping of stoopid...
1. please tell me what percentage of kongresskritters, political leaders, and korporadoes advertise themselves as being 'liberal' ? ? ? plus/minus 100% will do...
(hint: hardly registers on the dial)
2. kindly inform me (*snicker*) of the percentage of unionized workers in the US of A ...
(i'll wait while you look that up, propaganda victim... hint: about 7% or so)
3. HOW is it such a marginalized group in the extreme minority STILL manage to 'run everything' ? ? ?
fucking moron: grow another brain cell, the other one is lonely...
art guerrilla
aka ann archy
art guerrilla at windstream dot net
eof
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Wut
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Re: Wut
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Re: Wut
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Re: Re:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_district
Not sure what yr point is. Due process, privacy, and amendments to the constitution very much still apply.
They are very much a "state actor".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_actor
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Re: School district and The State
These are minors. First, they are protected under the Fourth Amendment. Where does the school district draw the line of in loco parentis, despite the child having one, or two, parents or legal guardians?
Even if this were limited to school, I wouldn't like it. It would be better for schools not to allow SMS, Twitter and Facebook during school hours, instead of this 24 hour per day/ 7 days per week surveillance. That is so wrong!
The school is using contractors. If there were a choice, the school district IT department would be required to observe privacy law and be less likely to exploit student information than an outside, private contractor. I'm just saying "what if", as this tracking, 24/7, of all minors is not ethical, whomever does it; with the exception of parents, as a personal family decision that should not be dictated by the school district, nor the state.
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Re:
hell, I just got a letter from my kid's school kindly informing me they've contracted with a company by the name of Interquest Detection Cannines, Inc to gestapoize the local campus. are we fucking boiling yet?
we can't afford buses for field trips but we can sure as hell afford the goddamn drug-sniffing dog squad!
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Get one!!
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Re:
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I can't help but remember
Damn Educators. They have the IQ of a turnip.
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Re: I can't help but remember
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It's a lot different. The stuff that Geo Listening is collecting has been deliberately made public. It does not require the use of subpoenas, etc to obtain it. It is obtained by screen scraping, effectively. There is a strong first amendment case for its legality.
They could even make their summarized and tagged, personally identified information public on a searchable, free website if they wanted to and it wouldn't violate the Constitution or any laws.
In fact that just what many aggregators, front ends, and so forth do -- such as Google, news aggregator sites, and the useful postprocessors for Craigslist or Twitter -- just to list some examples that have come under legal fire but are (correctly) defended here on Techdirt.
So I don't understand the comparison.
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Re:
Geo Listening being a private company, there needs to be something in place to prevent the school system trying to evade these restrictions by simply running to the private sector to get their dirty work done, as if that makes it okay.
So what I would suggest is that school system employees be prohibited from visiting or viewing the Geo Listening website using work computers or at home on their laptops and tablet devices.
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Response to: Anonymous Coward on Sep 10th, 2013 @ 4:39am
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Re:
The information may be public, but the fact that they are students living in a specific school district, attending a specific school, and having specific email addresses used by the students to access online services, is not public. Geolistening has absolutely no right to student rosters, email addresses, or any other identifiable information that would lead to the company to be able to track and find the students attending schools in the district on the web.
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Would it be ok for them (geo) to actually follow them around in public taking notes and pictures..
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Re:
Anything kids say that's critical of the school or teachers will be interpreted as a 'threat' worthy of expulsion.
Don't think for a minute that they give one rat's ass about the children, they care about CONTROL.
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"Your students are crying for help."
Yes, they are, and they want you to stop it - now.
"Geo Listening also provides a free mobile application "
Oh, I bet they do. It probably bypasses all privacy and will soon be mandatory.
Isn't it great that our children are being treated with respect and dignity? This will certainly prepare them for the world into which they have been born. Maybe there should be classes which teach how to circumvent these draconian measures.
Our tax dollars are being used for indoctrination rather than education. This is sad because we need a well informed electorate, not a bunch of zombies.
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Re:
-10
Re-read article. See me after class.
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Re: spending Ed money
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Re:
That may be what we(The People)need, but not what They need. I hate to go conspiratard, but I think a case needs to be made that the people we see in the MSM outlets are not the ones in charge. I'm not saying it's Satanists or Jews or Illuminati, I'm saying it's influential people with tons of money and connections.
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This is why it's good to know how to set up privacy settings.
Then the only people reading your stuff besides your friends is facebook or the NSA...
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Pretty much. For absolute security, put them in an induced coma and feed them through tubes. No chances of accidents, dumb ideas failing hard, bullying, anything. There, kids perfectly safe!
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A shame it'll take tens of millions of dollars in legal bills and fines when they lose such court cases to learn that doing this is not ok.
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In future traing
Making them good little drones, indeed.
I hope the kids fight back and take it down.
Too much spying on everyone going on now-from cradle to grave.
Welcome to the Orwellian nightmare.
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Re: In future traing
Mindset of today's kids:
Do it to me. Do it to Julia. Whatever.
If there is one movie that is in desperate need of a remake, it would be 1984. Maybe even re-title it, 2084. It would be great if we could keep J.J. Abrams and Michael Bay out of it.
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This seems redundant to me. Couldn't they just ask the NSA to share the information they already collect?
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Man...
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How long...
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Re: How long...
No threat of the FBI party van showing up at your house, no threat of ending up in a cell next to Bubba (well, hopefully). Just safe, 'innocent' trolling against a control-freak school board who want to rule every aspect of the students' lives.
Seems like something that would be right in the wheelhouse of the net's most prolific trolling communities.
As the Zen Master says, "We'll see."
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High School Students are smart
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Time Machine
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Re: Time Machine
ftfy
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Re: Re: Time Machine
ftfyt
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How?
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Re: How?
In my day you simply didn't use your real name online.
Only total squares would sign on to a system that required real names.
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Copyright
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Re: Copyright
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Ridiculous
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How do they know?
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Re: How do they know?
"btr1701" isn't your given name??
And all this time I was thinking that you had wacky-hippie-computer-geek parents or something.
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Re: How do they know?
Lets see what the district does with what appears to be a white-supremist, muslim terrorist student.
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look for an agenda
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Let's not pretend
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Feasability
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Don't let them monitor you.
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I guess the school wants to have the responsibility for the safety of the children
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Safety?
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Surveillance society
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Just wait...
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Those Darn Kids
Even rumors of 'monitoring' would spread quickly (even without public 'posts' - you tell 2 friends and they tell 2 friends and so on and so on, resulting in the immediate 'shunning' of such media. We were even careful about what we said on the wired-to-the-wall phone - Mom might be on the extension.
The people who SHOULD worry about this 'new service' today are the social media companies. I suspect it won't be long before it becomes popular to 'go dark' again among some student populations and either ditch social media completely or post only sham 'sanitized' posts to keep the monitors busy. If all those 'darn kids' decide (after sales people, Govt, NSA, CIA, and now their schools start spying on them) to abandon social media some of these highly prized cash cow companies might achieve their true valuations with the 16-30 year old demographic gone F2F and no longer there to read their ads... Duh!
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One step closer
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Big Brother
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The Glendale School District's actions are in DIRECT violation of the California Education Code
It goes on to give exceptions for private schools and colleges that students wish to attend. Here's the definition of "directory information":
Geolistening is a private profit-making entity, and, therefore, are not allowed to be given any identifiable information about students. Therefore, the Glendale School District is breaking the law.
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You got to be kidding
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Don't Underestimate These Kids...
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And parents?
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Suicide
There is a more fundamental flaw:
If depressed students wanted the schools moral busybodies to enforce their "help" on them, Geo Listening's spying would be superfluous.
Instead the spying will cause fewer students to seek advise from those that have pulled trough a depression. Advise about whom to talk to, what might help, and mitigating the feeling of being alone.
Because this outreach by necessity is from former strangers in a public fora, the student is forced to either keep quiet or risk meddling from the busybodies for years. The student is in no position to fend off the busybodies.
This program will cause students to die.
As the program were secret, even if it were to be cancelled now it will continue to cause students to die.
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