Service Provides Daily Reports on Teen’s Social Media

A private firm called Geo Listening is teaming up with school district clients to monitor and analyze students' posts on social media, including Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter. The firm provides the district daily reports about language, pictures and video that could be evidence of possible cyberbullying, harm, hate, despair, substance abuse, vandalism and truancy happening on campus. Geo Listening gathers the information from public posts on social networks. That means they do not monitor email, SMS, MMS, phone calls, voicemails, or unlock any privacy setting of a social network user – but, as they point out, lots of information is posted by students on public sites allowing schools the opportunity to intervene in a more timely manner. This will be interesting to watch as: 1) there are certain to be claims of privacy even though all the information Geo Listening monitors is considered public and 2) this may usher kids into using alternative forms of communication.