Southern California school district monitors students' online posts
Privacy fears as district hires firm to help prevent cyber bullying and other ills
A Southern California school district is trying to stop cyber bullying and a host of other teenage ills by monitoring the public posts students make on social media outlets in a programme that has stirred debate about what privacy rights teenage students have when they fire up their smartphones.
Glendale Unified School District hired Geo Listening last year to track posts by its 14,000 or so middle and high school students.
The district approached the company in hopes of curtailing online bullying, drug use and other problems after two area teenagers committed suicide last year.
The company expects to be monitoring about 3,000 schools worldwide by the end of the year, according to its founder, Chris Frydrych.
The Glendale district is paying US$40,500 to Geo Listening for the company's computers to scour public posts by students on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, blogs and other sites.
Analysts are alerted to terms that suggest suicidal thoughts, bullying, vandalism and even the use of obscenities, among other things. When they find posts they think should spur an intervention or anything that violates schools' student codes of conduct, the company alerts the campus.