alex.mullr.net/blog

Somebody told me about her (nameless) school in West London that has simply bizarre practices regarding pupils' safety online. The Catholic school, for girls aged 11 to 16, has a Facebook account shared by the staff, and pupils were encouraged to accept a friend request at a beginning of term assembly. They were then told that if they did not accept this friend request, they would be made to log in to their accounts in front of a member of staff so that the adult could check for any privacy issues or “social problems.” They’re searching for underage drinking, smoking or potentially revealing photos, but don’t seem to have quite grasped that Facebook is not the entire Internet.

This is crazy. What’s more crazy is that parents will support it, in the name of safety.

Comments

By Farhan Mannan on 31 August 2008 at 19:39:

That is crazy. What’s also crazy is that your italics come up in my RSS feed but not in my browser, for some reason.

By Alex Muller on 31 August 2008 at 19:53:

That’s a little odd… so apparently Opera on the Mac doesn’t render em, even though every other browser does. I really do love the web sometimes.

By Farhan Mannan on 07 September 2008 at 09:13:

:-)