School posts on Facebook could threaten student privacy

Like many of us, schools in the United States are active on social media. They use their accounts to share timely information, build community and highlight staff and students. However, our research has shown that schools' social media activity may harm students' privacy. As a researcher who specializes in data science in education, I and my colleagues came to the topic of student privacy unintentionally. We were exploring how schools used social media during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, specifically March and April of 2020. In the course of this research, we noticed something surprising about how Facebook worked:...