California school district hires firm to monitor students' social media

First off, no matter how you do it, it's pretty much impossible to do a quality job of what this firm is promising for $2.89 per student per year. However, there are host of other problems here.

-A lot of bad jokes are going to create false positives, which will make teaching staff ignore the warnings they do receive.

-The odds are rather high that a kid will post an orgy of pre-meditations and then do something horrible, but this contractor will either miss it or his warning will be ignored.

-Kids don't like being spied on and will use social networks that aren't monitored. Some geeks might even try encryption or code-talk.

What would I do? Educate children about the importance of getting their friends help when they need it. The people who know kids best are their friends. Compared to this contractor, they won't fall for as many bad jokes nor ignore as many subtle danger signs. Teach children to be good citizens who care about each other rather than carefully tended and monitored potential threats.

"a larger portion" of contract workers across the globe who labor a maximum of four hours a day because "the content they read is so dark and heavy,"

Oh great, he is using Mechanical Turk to watch over students in LA.

$40,500 is a lot of money for a public school district. This kind of spending really feels like a game of whack-a-mole to me. There were two suicides in your school district? Ignore the underlying factors and and go straight to "social media," because that's what all the buzz is about today, right?

It's a shame that given the serious shortage of public school funding in California that spending is done in such a myopic (and frankly, stupid) way. If you really want to build a better school, is adding excessive policing the first thing you should do?

That's right, get them used to gov't surveillance while they are young.

/s

Nobody has mentioned yet. I took a look at the geolistening website, and the pictures alone pointed to an entirely different problem.

I don't think the problem is lack of surveillance, I think it's teachers who are blind to what's happening at their schools, and parents who are doing a bad job at parenting (exporting it to education).

If a parent listens to their child well, the child will tell them they are being bullied, or have problems. If the child is afraid to, or is ashamed, the parent should notice this. It's not normal behavior. The same goes for teachers. If a parent complains to the school that their child is being bullied, that shouldn't be ignored. If a teacher notices a child being bullied, that shouldn't be laughed off. Children try to seek help by nature.

This seems to be an all-round lack of awareness and care for the child. I don't think technology can do much good with that attitude.

Can somebody explain to me why what students do outside the school is any of the school's business?

Oh well, I'm sure the students spend at least as much time cyberstalking the teachers as the schools do cyberstalking the students.

Social media monitoring is a huge industry at the moment, which I can say from first-hand experience. Lots of businesses, individuals, and organizations want to know what is being said about them or their field.

Even though no company providing these services can have perfect coverage (not even a perfect coverage of public internet communications), or perfect accuracy (generally it boils down to what you can express with search facets and boolean expressions), they can very aggressively sell the capability to people and organizations, because the 'idea' makes sense, and the fear/need is genuine - maybe there are relevant good/bad things happening out there that we need to know about.

I think this may be the real story here: there are private companies incentivized to sell surveillance of public communications, regardless of end-result quality for the customer, and education is just one of many places where that is relevant.

I don't think this is going to change - we now take for granted that search engines can see what is on the public web, and the same will become true of public social media -- although these tools are (generally) not yet as well known to the public as Google web search.

I'd personally really like to see distributed and private social communications technology to take off, so that this kind of legitimized spying becomes near-irrelevant, and I think there are big opportunities there - but we're not there yet and there'll be some interesting ground to navigate in the meantime.

This will filter out and miss the really nasty children (who'll just use networks with privacy), and catch the stupid ones who need education rather than discipline.

Yet another example of how schools are more about incarceration and control than education. Right now with public schools in the US we're at the edge of spending less per student on teachers than on administrative staff and other expenses. So many forces keep telling us to increase spending on education. And we have. Whether at the K-12 level or at colleges and Universities total spending on education has more than doubled (per student, adjusted for inflation) since the 1970s, while education outcomes have generally been flat. What has increased at a pace with spending is non-teaching staff, which, not surprisingly, don't seem to accrue any benefit in learning to the students.

The only way to solve the problem is to wrest control of the system away from the powerful interests that dominate it today. Unfortunately, a lot of legitimate educators are part of the machine and don't see any other way to make things better other than to continue to feed the machine with the hope that maybe a little bit trickles down to them and the kids.

Is this really new? I believe privacy issues have just gotten a spotlight now but I clearly remember a situation that happened involving my sister when she settled in the US more than 10 years ago.

I was running a small web host at the time and we just happened to host her website, for free of course. She had just moved to the US, gotten her green card and started a job as a teacher.

The school she was working for, or wanted to work for, had investigated her and found her personal website somehow. Even though she was posting under a pseudonym, and the website was hosted in Sweden. I don't remember if it was in Swedish though, maybe not.

They objected to certain things on that website, not sure if it was the BDSM links or something about linking to Amazon.

Either way, she didn't have a computer at the time so all she could do was ask me to take the website down for her.

As I remember it, a lawfirm hade made this discovery on behalf of the school where she wanted to work.

" All of the individual posts we monitor on social media networks are already made public by the students themselves. Therefore, no privacy is violated."

Just use privacy settings on Twitter/Facebook then.