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Comment by windexh8er | Hacker News Reader

How would this apply in a situation wherein a person uploads a picture of a minor that they are not the legal guardian for? Could that person sue the uploader of the photo for damages of having to go after Facebook? If situations like that are feasible under this then I would expect K-12 school districts to implement swift measure to ban all teachers from taking pictures of students as to avoid putting themselves in the middle. I find it egregious public schools don't have better policy on banning social media uploads of minors since it's such a gray area right now.

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When my kid was in elementary school we were expected to sign a “students in media” waiver that basically let them use the pictures they took of the children however they wanted. I don’t know if it was required but it was heavily pushed and included with a packet of about a thousand things to sign, most of which were required.

I never signed it. I just included the unsigned piece of paper (among others I disagreed with) in amongst the pile of papers I turned in to them. Nothing ever came of not signing but I suspect I could sue them now.

Honestly, I think this practice is horrible. Kids don't deserved to be plastered all over Facebook by their school. It's deeply uncomfortable.

it's cultural, too - there are many super popular apps for obscuring your kids face in Japan (or amongst japanese baseball players in the US, if you want to find some easy examples)

What’s the Japanese baseball player reference here?

Probably they're Japanese players bought by us teams and so bring their families over. They're not immigrants and will likely go home and they're culturally Japanese, so I expect they practice Japanese norms on social media like obscuring their children's faces when posting.

One of the smaller tasks I had when I was a school IT admin was removing the faces of students who hadn't had the waiver signed from photos the school wanted to upload to the site or social media.

My wife's school had a social media policy 10 years ago. She wasn't allowed to upload any picture with a child in it unless she had explicit permission from every child's parent to upload that particular photo. Permission had to be requested for every photo.

She was allowed to have a private photo site that all of the parents in the class had access to, and upload photos there. The parents were not supposed to re-share those, but some did.

Schools are finding that this is a problem, but haven't had the ability to manage it. So we have built a product to address this very issue (https://www.schoolbench.com.au).

SchoolBench allows you to match profiles with media consent, so you can work out what photos are able to be published or not.

> Schools are finding that this is a problem, but haven't had the ability to manage it. So we have built a product to address this very issue (https://www.schoolbench.com.au).

> SchoolBench allows you to match profiles with media consent, so you can work out what photos are able to be published or not.

How does Schoolbench get a picture of my kid if I did not consent for the school to use pictures of my kid?

Do you use facial recognition to find the faces that have to be removed?

We do use facial recognition to detect the faces in the photo, and then integrate with the school's student management system to work out what permissions or media consent has been granted for each student.

From there you can identify whether the photo overall is publishable, and if not, what students aren't. You can then crop/edit the photo to remove students from then on.

All of this happens in an on-premise VM, rather than calling out to a cloud service. Obviously you can run up an instance in AWS, etc.. if you want to cloud host, but that is the school's volition.

> We do use facial recognition to detect the faces in the photo, and then integrate with the school's student management system to work out what permissions or media consent has been granted for each student.

> From there you can identify whether the photo overall is publishable, and if not, what students aren't. You can then crop/edit the photo to remove students from then on.

> All of this happens in an on-premise VM, rather than calling out to a cloud service. Obviously you can run up an instance in AWS, etc.. if you want to cloud host, but that is the school's volition.

But if the parents don't sign the waiver allowing their kids photo to be used, how do you process the photo to determine if any kid in it has not had the waiver signed? Isn't the act of processing the image a violation of the agreement (which is effective since the waiver was not signed)?

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