The School That Reads Your Kid's Instagram

A student posted on r/privacy this week asking for help with a class debate. The question was whether a school should monitor its students’ social media accounts. The sides get assigned randomly, so they might end up arguing the opposite of what they believe. Most of their classmates were against the idea. Then someone raised the “what if it prevents an attack” scenario, and the room started to wobble.

That wobble is the part I found interesting. I’ve been thinking about it since, mostly because I have a teenager at home and this isn’t hypothetical for me.

The replies were what you’d expect from that corner of the internet. Plenty of heat, a fair bit of Flock cameras and the United States, and a few tangents I’ll leave alone. Underneath the noise were a few decent points. One person said kids who know adults are watching will just make second accounts for the real conversations. I think that’s right. Anyone who has raised a teenager knows the main account is the one for show. The real one has a name like a random bus timetable and about nine followers.

Another person asked what happens to the data after a student graduates. Nobody had an answer, because nobody ever does. Schools aren’t set up to be good custodians of that kind of information. I work in IT. I’ve seen how access controls get managed in organisations with proper budgets and dedicated security staff. A school with a part-time systems admin and a vendor contract is not going to be better. Someone is going to leave a spreadsheet in a shared drive. It’s a matter of when.

One comment made me stop, though. It said that parents are always talking about parental rights but never parental responsibility, and that watching kids outside school is the parents’ job. I mostly agree. But it’s a bit tidy. My daughter’s school deals with bullying that starts on a phone at 9pm and arrives in the corridor at 8:45am. The school ends up holding the consequences whether it wants to or not. So I understand why they’d want to see more. I just don’t think looking at everything is the answer.

That’s the tension, and I don’t think it resolves. The pro side has a real case. Kids are cruel to each other in ways that leave records, and sometimes the records contain a warning. Every few years there’s a story where someone says afterwards that the signs were all there, online, in public. It’s an awful thing to read, and it makes surveillance sound sensible.

But I’ve also read enough about how these tools work in practice. They flag keywords. They flag the wrong kids. A teenager writing dark song lyrics gets a meeting with the counsellor, and the one who is actually in trouble says nothing and is never noticed. Evidence that this stops attacks is thin. Evidence that it teaches kids to hide things is, I’d say, pretty good. I don’t know of a study that settles it either way, and I’m wary of anyone who says they have one.

What I keep coming back to is the thing one commenter said about learning to be good. If the only reason you behave is that someone is watching, you haven’t learned anything. You’ve learned to check for cameras. My daughter and I have an arrangement that’s much less sophisticated than any monitoring software. I don’t have her passwords. She knows she can show me anything that’s gone wrong and I won’t confiscate the phone for it. That last bit took some effort on my part. It’s been tested twice, and I passed once.

If I were handed a side in that debate, I’d be fine arguing against. If I got the other side, I’d argue that schools have a duty of care and then say plainly that a duty of care is not the same thing as a licence to read everything. That’s probably the honest version, and it’s a weak thing to say in a debate because it doesn’t win.

What I liked about the original post was the student’s discomfort. They started with a position, got hit with a hard hypothetical, and noticed their certainty slipping. That seems like the right reaction to me. Being unsure is the correct state to be in. I’d like the adults deciding this to be a bit more unsure too.