Are Violations of Student Privacy “Quick and Easy”? Investigating the Privacy of Students’ Images and Names in the Context of K-12 Educational Institution’s Posts on Facebook
As the use of social media increases in daily life, it has also increased for institutions in the field of education. While there may be benefits for schools to use this media outlet, the privacy of students within those schools may be at risk when their names and photos are shared on such a publicly accessible domain. In this study, we analyzed the extent to which students’ privacy is protected by qualitatively coding a random sample of 100 Facebook posts made by U.S. school districts from a population of over 9.3 million photo posts that we collected. Using inferential techniques, we found that students are somewhat protected compared to teachers and community members, with only 2.67% of students’ detected faces able to be identified by name. These numbers at first appear small, but if applied to the entire population, this could potentially leave between 153,218 and 1,l53,844 students identifiable to anyone on the Internet; the number of photos of students posted by schools and districts is much greater still, between 15.2 and 20.3 million. The same measure for staff and community members were 4.6% and 16%, respectively. We discuss the severity and scale of these privacy threats and make recommendations for research on student privacy in social media and other informal education-related contexts. In all, these could represent the largest publicly available collection of identifiable photos of students (and children) in the United States and could seriously threaten the privacy of those identified.