Thursday, March 31, 2016
Question of the Week No. 11
Cyber bullying, student violence at school and
teenage suicide is a growing concern in grades K-12 in schools across the
nation. Some schools are monitoring the
social media posts of students in an effort to combat these problems and
require students to disclose their social network passwords to school
officials. Many students and parents
oppose such monitoring, citing an invasion of student privacy. Is such monitoring sound public policy in
today’s digital world?
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No. I don't think that requiring the passwords is necessary to monitor cyber bullying. It seems to be more the prerogative of the parents to monitor their child's social media activity, not the school's. The school can step in with disciplinary measures when one of its students reports a problem. But requiring students to disclose passwords is an invasion of privacy that is unnecessary to deter cyber bullying. There are other less invasive measures the school could take. Disclosing passwords should be left to the prerogative of the parents. In my opinion, schools may even go so far as to require a student to pull up their account and log in, from the Principal's office. But to require their passwords goes too far.
ReplyDeleteTinker v. DeMoines (http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/cas/comm/free_speech/tinker.html), and some other Constitutional Law cases, say that students have less rights for activity that occurs on school grounds. Perhaps this is the legal loophole that would allow schools to require this of their students. But to require passwords, even when the activity did not occur on school grounds seems like an impermissible invasion of privacy. Furthermore, the Supreme Court has specified that, although the rights of students are necessarily circumscribed while they are on school grounds, they don't "shed their constitutional rights at the schoolhouse gates." Although Tinker and its companion cases were Free Speech cases, the same principle applies here--students have some rights, they don't completely shed them at the school house gates. So requiring students to give up their passwords, even for activity that occurs outside of school grounds, seems like an impermissible invasion of their privacy.
No, requiring students to give school administrators their social media passwords is not sound public policy. It is more reasonable for school administrators to monitor publically available information (including information students make public on social media) in an effort to prevent violent acts. Giving school administrators a password gives them far too much access into the private lives of their students, including any content of private messages sent over social media. This would seem to be a case of students shedding their rights at the schoolhouse gate, only in this case, they wouldn’t shed their rights for the ~35 hours a week they are at school, but would essentially be subject to 24/7 monitoring of one of their primary communication platforms.
ReplyDeleteThere are also some significant practical issues with this proposal. Would students be required to notify the school every time they changed their password? What if students used the same password for multiple accounts? Could that potentially compromise those accounts? How would the school ensure that the passwords were used only for their stated purpose? Perhaps an alternative to passwords might be the school requiring students to adjust their privacy settings so that the school’s account could see their posts (whether that meant they had to add them as a friend, like their page, follow, etc.). This still seems like an impermissible invasion of privacy, but less so than handing the school the keys to the account.
No, I don't think that school should require students to give up their passwords in order for school administrators to monitor their social media accounts. I see this as both an unnecessary liability for the school and an invasion of privacy that is not necessary to accomplishing the goal of eradicating online bullying. This also seems like forced speech in violation of the First Amendment.
ReplyDeleteNo. I think that schools should be permitted to monitor social networks but should not be allowed to demand students disclose their credentials to their social media accounts. From my perspective, such a practice would be similar to an overbroad search warrant. While a school has an interest in preventing violence and other forms of bullying, direct access to a social media account would reveal information about a student that the school has no interest in obtaining, e.g. religious views, political views, etc.
ReplyDeleteThere are also practical limitations to this proposal. Anonymous social platforms such a Yik Yak would prevent schools from enforcing this rule because the school would never find out which student has what account. The same could be said for fake or duplicate accounts. This proposal would also unduly chill speech because a student would potentially be afraid to say anything without fear that it violates the school's code of conduct.
Yes, I believe this to be sound policy in this ever growing presence of social media in the lives of children/teens. I do have some issues with the way the law is written and would hope for future laws to have more privacy safeguards. One idea could be a community board to decided if the request is truly meritorious. I also think--and perhaps very extreme to some that key words should be monitored while students are using the internet at school, and on such sights like yik yak. I would go as far to require all public schools to utilize such monitoring companies to search out bullying-- similar to Virginia’s implementation of the threat assessment such as monitoring certain key words using GEOCOP. Because bullying creates the potential for such confrontation to turn into acts of violence this requires not only the demand of social media accounts but intense education. Perhaps teens will be slightly nicer or think twice before posting if they fear retribution. Sure perhaps freedom is partly the freedom to act like a jerk to a certain extent but for teens this is a dangerous thought process--as teens and children may struggle with out to deal with such situations. This entire issue with the immense intertwining of technology and communication, a great deal of attention on all fronts are necessary.
ReplyDeleteAlong with such education comes the power to act. It is important for schools to be able to possess actual power to enforce such needed retribution to the cyberbully. Because such a teen would follow another student home from school through technology, it is important that a child feels safe at home. Younger and younger children that do not understand entirely their actions are given the ability to have zero inhibitions online. The school is being within its responsible and power to demand such access--as the school is the nexus of the incident and potential ones. When pondering on such behavior, there is nothing stopping such mocking to occur quickly from the playground into the private home by the masses. Moreover, for many teens they do not inherently trust parents to be able to solve the cyberbullying situation.
Illinois law allows school officials to demand and receive a student’s passwords in order to search the social media accounts—such as Facebook--regardless of when the first actual event took place. This provision does not seem troublesome to me. Many cyberbullying could arguably start far back but increasingly becomes a problem.
However, I do believe that the current law is structured in a far too vague manner, when it comes to what is considered a “violation of school rules” in comparison to cyberbullying; or any type of harassment at school that extend into the home afterhours. Here, for the school to be able to get the password for a violation of a school rule is incredibly troublesome—unless it truly is about Cyberbullying or bullying. What consists of school rules is not elaborated upon and thus give school officials immense capability with regard to intrusive unwarranted privacy violations in what constitutes “school rules.”
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ReplyDeleteNo, broad monitoring of student social media use by requiring students to surrender their passwords raises many constitutional issues in addition to being bad public policy. More importantly, such a policy raises children to believe that it is OK to submit to unreasonable searches at a key point during their development, and sets our democracy on a dangerous course, where future generations will be raised to simply submit to any search, proper or not. We already see evidence of such a mindset in children raised under totalitarian regimes around the world where the vast majority of their citizens are perfectly OK with never challenging authority, and are indeed not aware that there is a better way of life. Our system of democracy relies on checks and balances, with the ultimate check being we the people. It is not sound public policy to raise an entire generation of future citizens who are OK surrendering their private lives over to constant inspection and examination by authority figures.
ReplyDeleteWe have previously discussed why NSA’s monitoring of all phone communications of U.S. Citizens is bad public policy, and identified one of the key issues being Fourth Amendment rights, as well as the overbreath and indiscriminate nature of the intrusion. Although there is no explicit federal right to privacy in the United States, such a right is implied through the First, Fourth and Ninth and Fourteenth Amendments. Additionally, social media provides a public forum, much like public squares used to provide for centuries. If we all agree that there is intrinsic value in protecting the right to speech and assembly by providing a forum for the marketplace of ideas, then we must also agree that internet forums and social media need to be left alone and not chill speech before it occurs, regardless of the nature of the forum. Asking students to surrender their passwords to school authorities is akin to letting the police install a wiretap on your phone, provide a duplicate/master key to your home, and installing close-circuit cameras everywhere to monitor your every move all the time.
There are valid concerns over danger to students via cyber-bullying and other forms of abuse of social media. However, there have always been and always will be valid safety concerns over other places that both children and adults can be in, like parks, public streets, and indeed their own homes. Succumbing to fears of what could potentially happen in each those places does not mean we ought to give up our freedoms by letting the government intrude into each and every aspect of our lives. Doing so would upset the balance of power between the government and the people, necessary to maintain a healthy democracy. Similarly, we cannot give in to our fears about cyberbullying and surrender our private lives, and the private lives of our future citizens to create a police state. Conditioning students to surrender control of their lives to authority figures by giving up their passwords and their privacy from an early age will accomplish just that.