Glad I'm not in high school
Seems some DC area schools are worried about their students' use of the big, scary internets. Their reaction? Ban Facebook, of course!
The Post article quotes some sort of security consultant about the dangers of blogging and Facebook. I have no way of knowing whether his allegations that Facebook causes child molestation are true, but I suspect he doesn't, either. I'll accept the notion that predators might find a way on to the high school site, with fake identities and such, but I've heard of no instances of this to back up that theory. I find the other fears, that colleges and employers might reject students base on Facebook profiles, more far-fetched. How will they get access? Would they really spend the necessary time to snoop on each applicant's online activity?
I think the invasion of these students' privacy and the interference with their right to communicate is a pretty poor choice for these schools to make. It would be nice to respect kids rights once in a while.
The Post article quotes some sort of security consultant about the dangers of blogging and Facebook. I have no way of knowing whether his allegations that Facebook causes child molestation are true, but I suspect he doesn't, either. I'll accept the notion that predators might find a way on to the high school site, with fake identities and such, but I've heard of no instances of this to back up that theory. I find the other fears, that colleges and employers might reject students base on Facebook profiles, more far-fetched. How will they get access? Would they really spend the necessary time to snoop on each applicant's online activity?
I think the invasion of these students' privacy and the interference with their right to communicate is a pretty poor choice for these schools to make. It would be nice to respect kids rights once in a while.
posted by onlooker at 8:59 AM
3 Comments:
While I agree with your skepticism regarding the pedophile angle (and while no one wants their child - or any child - to suffer this fate, the numbers are rather low [and are solicitations, not actual contacts or molestations]), I think the admissions and job worries aren't as far-fetched. The officers of a school have "edu" addresses, so they could get facebook accounts, correct? And while it may be a stretch that a college would look up all its applicants online, perhaps the ones on the borderline? Admit or no? Wait list or accept? Scholarship or no? Things like that.
But more than that I think job worries are a real concern. The manager of the local ice cream shop might have the time others don't to check out the people who are applying for "scoop assistant."
Where the article gets it right is in saying the kids don't realize how accessible their info is. Saying that they think it would be weird or whatever for an "adult" to be looking at their sites - how would they ever know? And how do they know who's looking now? They don't!
(That last exclamation point was not meant to be alarmist. Heaven knows I hate the alarmist tendency.)
"Many schools forbid the use of school computers for anything not school-related. But it is much harder to regulate what students do on home computers."
Really? Well, no shit. More to the point, they have no jurisdiction (for lack of a better term). In loco parentis only works "in loco." If my high school had tried to do anything about what I was writing online, my lord the hell I would have raised. Private schools can do what they want (whether or not they should is up to them), but as long as kids aren't breaking any local/state/federal laws, the public schools had better stay far far away for the sake of their legal budgets.
And finally, who at these schools is actually doing this policing? Teachers/Admins with too much time on thier hands? Nosy parents?
I'm with Interested Soldier on the responsibility of schools to regulate students' online behavior - that responsibility doesn't exist for non-school-hour activity.
As to Michael's comments:
Facebook is an interesting creature, with many impediments to college admissions reps having access to damning information. The high school section is completely separated from the higher education users, as described in this FAQ answer:
Currently, our plan is to keep the high school and college networks completely separate. This means that features like searching, messaging, poking, and inviting people to be friends are restricted to the network you use. This is primarily for security reasons, but also because many of our users prefer it this way.
Furthermore, access to profile information and pictures is restricted to users within one's academic institution and the user's friends. Abuse by Facebook stalkers reporting students for policy violations does exist within colleges, but can't happen before a student is given an email address by that school. That would be a pretty desperately indecisive admissions department if you ask me. All this being the case, I can't see a compelling reason to ban the Facebook.
Ice cream shop is another thing - probably not going to have access to Facebook, so blogs are a bigger threat. But since there's no way a school can effectively prevent its students from wiling away their after-school hours on livejournal, a better approach to this whole business would be to educate students about their online privacy (or lack thereof), perhaps in, oh, I don't know, class or something. (I mean, if it's supposed to work for preventing sex, it ought to be good enough for preventing posting sexy pictures, right? But I digress.)
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