Social Media and Student’s Privacy: Best practices schools should know
Social Media has become an indispensable part of Student's lives and is increasingly becoming an addiction with serious consequences if not kept in check.
Recent research by Common Sense Media found that kids spend an average of almost an hour each day using social media, with only 3% of their online time spent on creation instead of consumption. Our students need teachers who utilize social media creatively, responsibly, and in a pro-social manner to be digital citizens.
Why do only one in ten instructors use social media for work?
Working in a school environment and dealing with anything from Family Education Rights and Privacy Act or FERPA Compliance to news-making incidents can be frightening and complex. It makes sense that many educators completely ignore these inquiries.
Eighty-one percent of the instructors who participated in the study mentioned above were worried about the dangers of combining social media with their professional lives.
However, there is also a significant benefit: Many educators have utilized social media to exchange best practices, provide students with an authentic audience for their work, promote digital citizenship among their pupils, and strengthen school communities. Any privacy hazards to students can be controlled with thoughtful, intentional use. However, the question remains!
Is Social Media Bad: Potential Harm to Students
We already know that facial recognition algorithms use photos to predict things like political affiliation or sexual orientation of people from face images (Kosinski, 2021; Wang & Kosinski, 2018). It is not out of the question to consider using photographs to make such predictions (right or erroneously) in ways that might lead to discrimination in the job, education, or other areas of one's life.
It is well known that Facebook develops "shadow" profiles for people portrayed in images but do not have accounts. Facebook also has a powerful facial recognition program, which they discuss in the help section of their website.
How common is the risk? 9.3 million of the impressive 18 million posts by American schools and school districts on Facebook contained one or more photographs (Burchfield et al., 2021). In our study, we randomly selected 100 of these 9.3 million postings with pictures, and we discovered 187 student faces, five of which we could quickly link to student names.
What to do: Do's and Don'ts for Social Media Privacy
Review this long list of dos and don'ts for protecting privacy and establishing a responsible example of safe sharing in your classroom if you are serious about protecting social media privacy.
Develop open, FERPA-compliant policies
Do look up and review the social media policies for your school or district. Everything you could do would depend on the current rules, particularly the acceptable-use policy.
Enable Consent or Opt-outs
Use forms for parental consent or opt-out. Obtain parental permission if you intend to share activities in your classroom. You can also push for the adoption of comprehensive opt-out forms at your school for more direct parental control.
Many parents are exercising their Privacy Rights by sending privacy request, technically known as DSAR request, which mandates for-profit businesses, even schools, and universities, to provide adequate and relevant data they have on the Student or the subject concerned.
Start utilizing social media in your classroom only after establishing rules and obtaining agreement. Instead, contact those who can assist with their setup and installation.
PRIVACY BEST PRACTISES
Do think about opening a different account for business use. You will avoid many headaches in the future.
Look at the privacy options on any individual social media accounts. Set your personal Twitter account, for instance, to "Protected" so that only people you follow can see your tweets.
Explore Facebook's privacy settings. However, remember that Facebook's privacy settings are just for others to see your information. Everything is still visible to Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites, and in some circumstances, third-party apps you connect to via social media also receive privileged access.
Consent Management and DSAR Automation are some of the best privacy tools for online presence through websites, ed-tech portals, mobile apps, or social media. If you also collect Student's data, then these are must-haves.
Use the photo-editing apps on your tablet or phone. These can assist you in fast cropping or masking a photograph's delicate areas before uploading.
Be sure to explain the security and privacy activities to the students. Let them know how, when, and what they will use social media for. Encourage a debate about the why, considering both the advantages and disadvantages.
Ask students for feedback, and if they have more delicate worries about their images or personal information being public, urge them to speak with you privately. Respecting the preferences of each Student should go without saying. And Schools can do these with Privacy tools like Consent Management and DSAR Automation.
While Consent management helps schools to save Student's consent and preferences, DSAR automation helps to locate Student's data if parents or guardians ever send a privacy request.
As many parents know that today's edtech-platform collects lots of Student data used for personalization and ad targets, they want to be careful with the information these organizations hold on their data. And that's where parents and students send privacy requests to schools and universities.
To tackle these hectic situations and avoid paying hefty fines and penalties, schools and organizations should automate DSAR, which automatically verifies, processes, and locates personal data and sends it to the concerned subject for access, modification, or withdrawal.
Do search for any student or class information that is readily apparent as you travel around the room. If you are a teacher, you undoubtedly have much information written on the walls and whiteboards in your classroom.
This information, which could be confidential, includes student names, app class codes, logins and passwords, and grades. Please list everything in your room, remove these postings, and ensure they are not included in any media you record.
Make a list of the digital files and folders you have. How are the digital records of your students organized on your computer and any shared machines you may have? Make sure the right people can only access the information.
PROTECT THE CONFIDENTIALITY AND PERSONALLY IDENTIFIABLE INFORMATION OF STUDENTS.
Before we discuss the appropriate ways to handle students' personally identifiable information, there are three crucial questions you should ask yourself.
Does this post contain any information that might be used to identify you?
Do I have express authorization to post it online?
Is the content I am sharing helping students learn more?
Those inquiries will help you out a lot.
Never disclose a student's name or face without the parents' permission. Always ensure students' names and faces are hidden unless you have reached an agreement with parents and pupils. Beware of reflections.
Be aware of how you commercialize your classroom in your posts. Social media can be an excellent method to provide feedback to the creators of educational products but keep in mind that posts on items that feature your students may turn them into spokespeople without their consent.
Keep an eye out for jerseys and name badges. These student name leaks are simple to miss.
Please don't make any students' academic records public, including their grades and tests. This is a crucial component of FERPA and has a broad scope. If you need clarification on something that might count, keep it to yourself. Pay close attention to how you respond to student work shared online.
Remember that handwriting contains information that can be used to identify a person. Names, addresses, and student ID numbers are among the items that FERPA considers personally identifiable. Still, you should know that it also protects other biometric information, such as handwriting.
Conclusion: Distancing Students from social media platforms will only hamper their ability to understand and thrive in the digital age. Though there are pros and cons to everything, students should be taught realistically about the damaging repercussions of social media and other platforms on their personal lives. Therefore, it is in society's interest, parents, and the educational system, to create an ecosystem of educating the future generation about the security and privacy threats of social media and platforms which continually require individual personal data. This will build a sense of belongingness and a sustainable future for our children.
Visit Adzapier to learn more about Data, Privacy and Compliance.