OK, I think we really need to investigate protecting the
privacy of our youth. This is effectvely acclimating our
children to minimal privacy as enforced by authoritarian
organizations.
If they're posting publicly, then they're posting publicly. Privacy isn't a thing.
My advice to my son will be don't use social media; if you must use it, don't post publicly on it. If you must post publicly, know that everything you say will be visible forever to _someone_. And post accordingly.
> If they're posting publicly, then they're posting publicly. Privacy isn't a thing.
But in many cases they weren't. That article talks about taking personal photos off of a student's personal device just because they connected it to a school computer for a short time. It included things like nude photos. Now the school has committed child pornography by copying these photos from the student's device. I don't see how anyone can think that's reasonable. Just because I bring a bag with personal letters into the school doesn't mean the school has a right to open those letters, read them, and make Xerox copies of them. It's the same with bringing a personal device to school.
>Now the school has committed child pornography by copying these photos from the student's device...
This is where the law gets kids in way more trouble than is really necessary. There's a little known provision in most child porn laws that exempts people reporting child porn from charges. But think about it, to get that protection, you must report.
So they surreptitiously lift the pics from a kid's phone, and then the alerts go to the police chief, kid's counselor, administrators, etc etc. From there it can make its way to public prosecutors really quickly if calmer heads don't prevail among the adults who got the initial alerts. And calmer heads rarely prevail in my experience. (To be fair, I think most police chiefs may have an actual obligation to let prosecutors know about it? Not sure?)
There's a little known provision in most child porn laws that exempts people reporting child porn from charges.
That doesn't fix the problem. If they're bulk downloading photos from a phone, then most of the photos are going to sit there unexamined. Later on, looking for something else, somebody will stumble upon those photos and discover that they've been sitting there for months or years. But the school hadn't been reporting the crime.
I don't think you're quite getting how a lot of these monitoring systems work. They actually have AI's, (more like expert systems), reading your messages and viewing your images in as close to real-time as possible. These alerts are automated. There is rarely a common sense applying human in the loop...
and that's the problem. Humans are not even engaged in the process until the alerts have gone out. That's not cool. I mean, sure, they get around the problem you bring up, every image is going to get looked at super quickly, but the solution is worse for society than the problem. (At least it is in my opinion.)
So those photos would never sit on the service provider's servers for that long without being examined.
Valid point. I was speaking from the context quoted in
SolaceQuantum's comment around public scraping.
It gets murkier with attached devices.
As long as it's made clear to the person attaching the device what data/why is taken (the article doesn't say), it's not entirely unreasonable - you're attaching your device to a foreign network and giving it permission to do what it wants. So it will do what it wants.
But that's a huge qualifier, and I suspect one that wasn't met here.
My advice to my son will be don't use social media; if you must use it, don't post publicly on it. If you must post publicly, know that everything you say will be visible forever to _someone_. And post accordingly.