Student safety or privacy invasion?

• Position: PRIVACY

A school district in Southern California is monitoring students' posts on social media sites in an effort to stop cyber-bullying and other teenage issues, according to a recent article in the Los Angeles Times. Glendale Unified School District reportedly hired Geo Listening in 2012 to track posts by its estimated 14,000 middle school and high school students after two teenagers committed suicide.

The school district has restricted the monitoring to publicly available pages. Further, the district did not supply Geo Listening a list of current accounts. Instead the company uses "deductive reasoning" to link public accounts to students, according to Chris Frydrych, founder and chief executive of Geo Listening. (He declined to elaborate when asked what...