{"id":68219,"date":"2013-09-11T13:13:02","date_gmt":"2013-09-11T12:13:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/school-for-snooping-la-to-monitor-students-social-media-postings\/68219\/"},"modified":"2013-09-11T14:46:40","modified_gmt":"2013-09-11T13:46:40","slug":"school-for-snooping-la-to-monitor-students-social-media-postings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/latest-news\/school-for-snooping-la-to-monitor-students-social-media-postings\/","title":{"rendered":"School for snooping: LA to monitor students\u2019 social media postings"},"content":{"rendered":"
Authorities in California are now snooping on school students’ social media postings to catch law-breaking, bullying and other harmful activities. But parents worry the move is yet another example of Big Brother prying into ordinary Americans’ lives.<\/div>\n

Glendale Unified School District, the third-largest in Los
\nAngeles County, has paid Geo Listening Company over $40,000 to
\nfollow its students on social media networks. The stated aim is
\nto prevent law-breaking, bullying and doing harm to themselves
\nand others.<\/p>\n

Under the scheme, the online activities of Glendale’s 13,000
\nmiddle-school and high-school students are closely monitored.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll of the individual posts we monitor on social media
\nnetworks are already made public by the students themselves.
\nTherefore, no privacy is violated,\u201d<\/i> Geo Listening Company
\nsaid, adding it does not \u201cmonitor email, SMS, MMS, phone
\ncalls, voicemails or unlock any privacy setting of a social
\nnetwork user.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n

Geo Listening is aiming to become a market leader in aggregating
\nand analyzing publicly available content for educational
\nfacilities’ security needs.<\/p>\n

Since the company only tracks publicly available posts, students
\ncan evade monitoring by posting privately. But anonymous services
\nsuch as Tor are coming under pressure<\/a> in the US, raising the
\npossibility that private web surfing could become a thing of the
\npast.<\/p>\n

Geo Listening bills its computing capabilities as \u201cproviding
\nactionable daily reports to designated school administrators and
\nstaff, using a robust tier methodology\u201d<\/i> that does not
\ninterfere with existing school policies or procedures.<\/p>\n

\"Vladimir<\/p>\n

It claims it can track \u201cbullying, cyber-bullying, despair,
\nhate, harm, crime, vandalism, substance abuse, truancy\u201d<\/i> and
\nmuch more, using popular services like Twitter, Facebook,
\nInstagram, Picasa, Vine, Flickr, Ask.fm, YouTube, Google+ or
\nanywhere else where people share information voluntarily.<\/p>\n

Dick Sheehan, Glendale’s school supervisor, told the Glendale
\nNews-Press that the new service is helping the district to go
\n\u201cabove and beyond\u201d<\/i> in matters of security.<\/p>\n

School board member Christine Walters told the newspaper that
\neducators simply have to be more \u201cproactive to find ways to
\nprotect our students from ongoing harm,\u201d<\/i> because they are
\nwell aware of bullying taking place online.<\/p>\n

\u201cSimilar to other safety measures we employ at our schools, we
\nwant to identify when our students are engaged in harmful
\nbehavior,\u201d<\/i> Walters said.<\/p>\n

Glendale opted to learn more about its students after a
\n15-year-old boy, an alleged bullying victim, committed suicide by
\njumping out of a school window in plain view of dozens of his
\nclassmates, Glendale News-Press reported. The contract with Geo
\nListening was signed some time ago.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur ability to provide a social network monitoring service
\nfor each of your respective campuses separates our company from
\nany other in the marketplace,\u201d<\/i> Geo Listening said, adding
\nthat its \u201cunique service model for public and private schools
\nalso allows administrators to focus on students rather than
\ntechnology.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n

Cyber security experts warn, however, that students should be
\nmade aware of the monitoring, or they will fear trusting
\nanyone.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs a parent, I find it very Big Brother-ish,\u201d<\/i> said Yalda
\nUhls, a researcher at the Children’s Digital Media Center at the
\nUniversity of California in Los Angeles.<\/p>\n

Copyright: RT<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Authorities in California are now snooping on school students’ social media postings to catch law-breaking, bullying and other harmful activities. But parents worry the move is yet another example of Big Brother prying into ordinary Americans’ lives. Glendale Unified School District, the third-largest in Los Angeles County, has paid Geo Listening Company over $40,000 to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":68220,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487,1614,18],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-68219","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-breaking-news","8":"category-surveillance-big-brother","9":"category-latest-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68219","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68219"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68219\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/68220"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68219"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68219"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68219"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}