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

Abstract

For many schools and districts in the United States, Facebook has emerged as an important tool for sharing timely information, building a sense of community, highlighting staff and students, and many other purposes. However, neither researchers nor schools and districts have paid enough attention to how their Facebook use may pose a risk to the privacy of individuals — often students who are minors. Joshua Rosenberg, Macy Burchfield, Conrad Borchers, Benjamin Gibbons, Daniel Anderson, and Christian Fischer describe their recent studies showing that 15-20 million photos of students have been shared on publicly accessible Facebook pages of public schools and districts. They estimate that at least 150,000 of these photos — and perhaps as many as a million or more — depict students who are identifiable by name and school or district. They review some of the risks to students that might result from such social media posts and offer practical steps that schools and districts can take to minimize these risks.

Trends and Topics in Educational Technology, 2022 Edition

“…Though “ethics” was the most common of these terms, it only was represented in 1-in-200 article titles, and though current “practices with student data represent cause for concern, as student behaviors are increasingly tracked, analyzed, and studied to draw conclusions about learning, attitudes, and future behaviors” (Kimmons, 2021 , para. 2; cf., Rosenberg et al, 2021 ) and proctoring software becomes increasingly ubiquitous (Kimmons & Veletsianos, 2021 ), “privacy” was only mentioned in 1-in-333 article titles and “proctor*” was only in 1-in-600 titles. In our current pandemic context, we have often heard educational technologists lament the fact that decision-makers and those in power may not seek our guidance in addressing issues related to the pandemic that would clearly benefit from our expertise.…”

Posts About Students on Facebook: A Data Ethics Perspective

“…As social media data and data mining methodologies allow new ways to examine student and family education rights issues and current data use practices, research has the potential to reveal potential harms to students; even relatively low proportions of posts that reveal the PII of students mean that the privacy of hundreds of thousands of students may be risked. Though there are steps educational leaders working in schools and districts can take to mitigate these risks (Rosenberg et al, 2021), we encourage educational researchers to adopt a data ethics perspective to envision how to balance the benefits of social media with the need to honor the privacy of students.…”

“We Are Trying to Communicate the Best We Can”: Understanding Districts’ Communication on Twitter During the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…Other past research has demonstrated that parents hold positive views toward their children’s K–12 institutions’ communication with them when they promote effective communication (Bordalba & Bochaca, 2019). Indeed, technology is a key part of how schools and districts communicate with parents (Beeman & Henderson, 2012; Rogers & Wright, 2008), as well as how individual teachers communicate with parents (Graham-Clay, 2005; Kraft, 2017), though there is debate over educational social media use as both a communicative and community-building tool as well as one that is used by teachers and students in classroom contexts, highlighting concerns about student privacy, safety, legality, the role of capitalism in education, and mental health (Howard, 2013; Krutka, Heath, & Willet, 2019; Krutka, Manca, et al, 2019; Rosenberg, Borchers, et al, 2021; Rosenberg, Burchfield, et al, 2021).…”