School for snooping: LA to monitor students’ social media postings

Authorities in California are now snooping on school students’ social media postings to catch law-breaking, bullying and other harmful activities. But parents worry the move is yet another example of Big Brother prying into ordinary Americans’ lives.

Glendale Unified School District, the third-largest in Los Angeles County, has paid Geo Listening Company over $40,000 to follow its students on social media networks. The stated aim is to prevent law-breaking, bullying and doing harm to themselves and others.

Under the scheme, the online activities of Glendale’s 13,000 middle-school and high-school students are closely monitored.

“All of the individual posts we monitor on social media networks are already made public by the students themselves. Therefore, no privacy is violated,” Geo Listening Company said, adding it does not “monitor email, SMS, MMS, phone calls, voicemails or unlock any privacy setting of a social network user.”

source rt.com