When Sharing Isn't Caring: How Educational Institutions Share Students’ Personally Identifiable Information on Facebook
Joshua M. Rosenberg, Conrad Borchers, Macy A. Burchfield, Daniel A. Anderson, Sondra M. Stegenga, Christian S. Fischer · 2022
Schools and school districts now use social media for a variety of reasons, but alongside the benefits that accompany these K-12 educational institutions' social media use come questions about privacy and safety. We use a dataset of around 18 million posts by United States schools and districts on Facebook to explore how these posts might risk the privacy and safety of students by depicting (showing a photo of a student's face) or identifying (by depicting a student and naming them with their first and last name) them in public posts. We also examine which Facebook page characteristics and structural factors (i.e., the size of the district) might be associated with posts that depict or identify students. Through our sequential mixed methods design involving qualitative coding of a sample of 400 posts, we found that around 4.9 million posts depict students and that around 725,000 posts identify students. Districts with a higher student poverty rate and districts that post more were more likely to depict students in any one post. We discuss these findings and suggest directions for future research in terms of data ethics.