Are Violations of Student Privacy “Quick and Easy"? Implications of K-12 Educational Institutions’ Posts on Facebook

Abstract

As the use of social media increases in daily life, it has also increased for institutions in the field of education. While there may be benefits for schools to use this media outlet, the privacy of students within those schools may be at risk when their names and photos are shared on such a publicly accessible domain. In this study, we analyzed the extent to which students’ privacy is protected by qualitatively coding a random sample of 100 Facebook posts made by U.S. school districts from a population of over 9.3 million photo posts that we collected. Using inferential techniques, we found that students are somewhat protected compared to teachers and community members, with only 2.67% of students’ detected faces able to be identified by name. These numbers at first appear small, but if applied to the entire population, this could potentially leave between 153,218 and 1,l53,844 students identifiable to anyone on the Internet; the number of photos of students posted by schools and districts is much greater still, between 15.2 and 20.3 million. The same measure for staff and community members were 4.6% and 16%, respectively. We discuss the severity and scale of these privacy threats and make recommendations for research on student privacy in social media and other informal education-related contexts. In all, these could represent the largest publicly available collection of identifiable photos of students (and children) in the United States and could seriously threaten the privacy of those identified.

Social media and students’ privacy: What schools and districts should know

“…The pages of schools and districts, on the other hand, are usually public, and students and parents have limited agency regarding what and how much is posted. While many K-12 institutions require parents and students to sign a waiver before publicly sharing their child’s name and face, our research has revealed that the accessibility of photos of students may be far greater than most parents realize (Burchfield et al, 2021). Having more complete information about the risks might make a difference in a parent or child’s decision regarding the sharing of their information.…”

“…How widespread is the risk? We found that there have been a remarkable 18 million posts on Facebook from U.S. schools and school districts, and 9.3 million posts included one or more images (Burchfield et al, 2021). In our research, we randomly sampled 100 of these 9.3 million posts with images and found 187 student faces, five of which we could easily connect with student names.…”

“…While some research on social media use has focused on privacy (e.g., Fiesler & Proferes, 2018), no research to our knowledge has investigated it in the context of K-12 educational institutions. We have made some initial steps into building a research base by examining the extent to which students are identifiable in Facebook posts of public schools and districts and pinpointing the potential risks of that data (Burchfield et al, 2021).…”

Facebook Post Data: A Primer for Educational Research

“…For instance, researchers could access the Facebook pages of all of the schools or districts in the United States. My colleagues and I have begun to use the posts of such pages to try to understand whether and how the personally identifiable information of students may be shared (Burchfield et al, 2021). We think that this data source and others that require large-scale data collection and analysis may be fruitful to carry out using the CrowdTangle platform (and Facebook data).…”

Updated or Outdated Consent? A Study of the Media Release Policies of U.S. K-12 School Districts

“…In our prior research, we estimated that around 4.9M photos of students are shared on the strictly public pages of U.S. schools and districts. For around 725 thousand of these 4.9M photos, students can easily be connected to the first and last name included in the message of the posts (Burchfield et. al., 2021).…”