http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/09/california-school-district-hires-online-monitoring-firm-to-watch-13000-students/The way Chris Frydrych tells it, monitoring schoolkids’ public social media posts and then reporting questionable activities about them daily to school officials is an unquestionable net positive.
So his new startup, Geo Listening, does just that. Geo Listening looks for social media posts that deal with depression, despair, online bullying, hate speech, or other words and phrases that may indicate a possible violation of school codes of conduct—whether it's by a student or someone in and around a school’s location.
Last month, Geo Listening even signed a deal with the Glendale Unified School District located north of downtown Los Angeles. Their agreement became the first publicly-confirmed partnership between the company and a school district. Glendale will pay $40,500 for Geo Listening to monitor posts by 13,000 students across its eight middle and high schools for an academic year.
“If our service gets kids to privatize their pages, that’s all a positive for our kids and our society,” Frydrych told Ars. He noted that the service would not catch posts that are locked down as private.
Geo Listening—based in Hermosa Beach, California, a small beach town just south of the Los Angeles International Airport—is not given a list of student names. Rather, it is scanning posts across Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and other online services, searching for certain keywords and location information that would tie a person to the school community. Relevant data is then presented in a daily report to school officials.
“All of the individual posts we monitor on social media networks are already made public by the students themselves,” Geo Listening writes on its website. “Therefore, no privacy is violated.”
The company’s privacy policy further states:
Geo Listening’s service processes, analyzes, and reports only publicly available data that aligns with school district procedures and board policy related to student conduct and safety. The Geo Listening system takes into account frequency and severity of a student’s posts that include indicators relating to bullying, cyber-bullying, hate and shaming activities, depression, harm and self harm, self hate and suicide, crime, vandalism, substance abuse, and truancy.
Geo Listening does not circumvent any personal privacy settings on the platforms where it indexes content. The Geo Listening Services are intended solely to collect and process publicly available information.
