I can’t believe how many responses I’m reading on this thread from “conservatives” who think this is okay. Any system that allows or mandates that the compulsory public school system take these kind of liberties with the privacy of a student with regard to an activity that takes place outside of school is just another example of the steady erosion of our freedoms and the expansion of the government’s facility to interfere in every aspect of life.
The idea that the school officials have to do this because they’re responsible is exactly the same mentality that, to one degree or another, drives almost every outrage and invasion perpetrated by the nanny-state left.
The school has neither the right nor the responsibility to regulate or review her Facebook account. Whether she should have one or not is totally beside the point. I don’t care if the kid is a bully, a cheat, a liar, or a bank robber. If it’s off the campus (and this example certainly qualifies as such) then it is not within the school’s purview to pursue it.
Take any other position, and you get exactly what we already have: a crappy, intrusive, petty tyranny that any of us or our children could run afoul at any time for five hundred stupid, arbitrary reasons.
No one forces you to write anything on the internet
However, there is a difference between privacy and secrecy, when a kid begins to publish real or perceived threatening or self harm messages to other minors on a publicly used medium like the internet
Then it could be argued her password (fraudulently obtained by virtue of her lying about her age) protects her “privacy” no more than a gym lock protects the privacy of a kid to keep a weapon and to publish threats or messages about it to other kids
Stashers of porn, criminals, and terrorists have discovered that their right to “privacy” on the internet even in their own homes is trumped by their misusing that medium to incite or otherwise cause harm
The message to children is- you have the right to privacy, just not the right to say any damn thing you want to say about any school employee or classmate or your sex life to other minors in your school, without accepting the possibility of being busted. The internet is not a “private” medium, ven if you try to make it one.
In my day we passed notes to each other and gasp, the teachers confiscated them and read them and no one sued the teacher for violating our privacy when we got busted
So if you value your “privacy”, keep your thoughts and activities “private”
If your kid gets shot at school by some disturbed kid using facebook to ruminate with classmates about her plans, or your kid is falsely labeled a slut by a disturbed facebook poster who is a classmate, the school community is being abused and get back to me on the schools responsibility to enforce a zero tolerance code of conduct