Schools’ Social Media Ban Backfires, Jeopardizing Student Privacy
from the think-this-through dept
What if banning social media from schools actually put kids at even greater risk?
One of the more annoying things in talking about tech policy is how many people refuse to think one step ahead about how the world reacts to their policy proposals. We’ve talked about this in many contexts, but one that keeps coming up as illustrative is eating disorder content, where getting big social media companies to ban such content backfired.
That’s because the issue with eating disorder content online wasn’t a “supply side” problem (kids getting eating disorders because they stumbled upon such content online), but rather a “demand side” problem (kids with eating disorders seeking out such content). When social media sites banned that content, the kids still went looking for it, but often found it in less reputable places, and (even worse!) often in places that didn’t also try to provide resources or other community members to guide people towards recovery.
For every effort to “ban” something, we need to think about what impact it will actually have.
Lately, there’s been a lot of talk about “banning social media in schools.” And you can see why this feels like it makes sense intuitively. There are concerns about how much time kids spend on social media, what content they see, and certainly whether or not it’s relevant in schools. I mean, we already have school districts across the country filing ridiculous lawsuits against social media companies claiming that they’re melting kids’ brains.
So shouldn’t banning social media in schools be a no-brainer?
Turns out it’s a lot more complex than that. The always excellent reporter Emily Baker-White has a piece at Forbes that, among other things, is looking at what happens in schools that have banned social media. And it’s not making kids any more safe. If anything, the reverse is happening.
As with the eating disorder issue discussed above, it appears that the kids these days want their social media. And if schools try to ban social media, the kids are finding ways around those bans, often using questionable free VPNs to route around network level blocks. And those free VPNs are… pretty bad about the privacy of people using them:
It’s common practice among most school districts to restrict the internet access of their students to prevent them from browsing porn and “inappropriate” websites — from social media platforms to educational sites about racial identity, mental and reproductive health. And, increasingly, it’s common practice among many kids to use apps that bypass those restrictions so they can view those sites anyway.
Today, 1 in 4 high American school students now use workarounds to avoid schools’ internet restrictions, which, in addition to blocking websites, can also monitor their personal online lives, including their social media posts, emails, and browsing history. The most common of these workarounds is a VPN, or virtual private network, which obscures a user’s IP address from the websites they navigate to and the apps they use. But VPNs — especially the free types that teens are most likely to use — often collect sensitive personal information like location and browsing history.
Many unscrupulous free VPN companies then sell that information to data brokers. Some of them have ties to China, where the Chinese Communist Party has the authority to force any company to hand over such data. And others may contain malware that allows hackers to take control of devices on which they are installed.
Yeah. So, for all the hyped up fear about TikTok supposedly shipping all our kids’ data to China, it appears a more effective way for China to get data on American kids is to… have more American schools ban social media at school, leading them to use sketchy VPNs that suck up data and keep that data in China.
And yes, this can lead to very real risks:
Just last week, the U.S. Justice Department indicted a Chinese national for allegedly using free VPNs to gain access to 19 million IP addresses, more than 600,000 of which were in the United States, and renting them out to criminals who used them to stalk and defraud people and engage in child exploitation.
Of course, rather than recognizing that maybe banning stuff outright might lead to worse results, I’m pretty sure all this is going to lead to is the next mole to whack in this never-ending game of whac-a-mole, and politicians and schools will be looking to figure out ways to… ban free VPNs.
The article has lots of concerned quotes from policymakers… focused on the problem of VPNs. But not so much on how their own moral panics drove up the usage of these VPNs.
Still, this is yet another example where when folks like Jonathan Haidt insist there are really no downsides to his policy proposals — which include banning social media for many kids — they may not understand at all what they’re talking about.
Filed Under: china, privacy, social media, social media bans, teens, vpns
Comments on “Schools’ Social Media Ban Backfires, Jeopardizing Student Privacy”
Expect the knee-jerk response to be, “okay, we’ll just take away their devices.” And when that doesn’t solve the problem, they’ll have another knee-jerk reaction available that’ll be likewise useless and authoritarian and will backfire.
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My daughter is getting her teaching license and she had some classroom experience as part of the program. The teacher “collects” phones at the start of class but it’s a useless exercise as the kids have fake or extra phones to turn in while keeping their real phones.
These moral crusaders just need to realize they are tilting at windmills and no matter what they think of the kids will find a way around it.
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If school feels like a prison, kids are gonna act like prisoners.
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I just claimed my parents didn’t allow me to have a cell and the teacher couldn’t prove otherwise because my folks didn’t like faculty confiscating my personal property, and so backed up my lie. Then when a shooter came into the school during a general assembly, I was the only one with an accessible phone to call the cops and let them know where the shooter was moment to moment.
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Unfortunately a similar thing is happening in my school district. At the beginning of the school year my school district’s administrator BANNED TEACHERS FROM ALLOWING STUDENTS TO USE CELL PHONES in the classroom. One teacher who previously had a more lenient cell phone policy said that if a teacher doesn’t enforce a cell phone ban then they have to face a meeting with the administrator. Even that includes refusing to confiscate a phone seen in class.
A couple weeks later there was a presentation on why cell phones were banned this school year. At the end of the presentation I asked why a teacher can’t allow cell phone use in free time when students are in the classroom but can do anything they want because there is no teacher giving instruction or classwork to do. The reason was largely based on the social media moral panic that has penetrated US governments, US health organizations, and teachers.
On the network side, this is just weird. First, the LAN can see which devices are using VPN, and also could block access to VPN.
Beyond that, most of the devices are phones connected to cellular networks anyway so whatever lol.
Sue! Legislate! Panic!
i wouldn’t want to be in any sort of dangerous situation like a emergent building fire with any of these supposed adults.
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Underpaid, understaffed it departments. Most schools probably don’t have someone who has the time, or potentially skill to configure it or they don’t have the money for newer proper hardware that does
Re: Re: Sounds like our government.
And the IRS, and all the rest.
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They already block other stuff. The point wasn’t that this is what they should do, it’s that all the stuff they do is stupid. IT just implements things, it’s the local and state weirdos who make the decisions. (But if they do want something done, then they should fund it. But maybe fund actual education bit first.)
Yeah, I’m looking at this and am triggered into “full skeptic mode”.
Heard this before, but with TikTok as the source. Going to have to provide more proof that this is an actual issue, before I consider panicking. And still, there are easier routes to getting “that data”.
How is “VPN software may have malware” anything more of a scare than “software in the Play Store may have malware”? How is this a special risk? (Note: The link to “an instance of malware via VPN software” is in the pcmag link in the second quote in the post above, in case you didn’t spot it earlier.)
And yeah, there’s something special about this scare. Transferring it from Tiktok to VPN software is a nothingburger. I mean, what strategic national value is China going to get out of that data? What’s in it for them? Will they be … shudder … tweaking their algorithms to display more attractive content, or advertising more likely to be clicked through? Sorry, still yawning.
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Targeted disinfo, should China’s disinfo armies decide to stop being bullies and start smart disinfo campaigns.
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Most VPN are really intrusive since running a VPN service is not free (if it’s free, you are the product), ads are rarely the main source of revenue since most free VPN don’t encrypt data from the client but the VPN server, so peeking the data is the easiest and the more lucrative way.
Since VPN servers need to be physically placed on countries, each having their own specific laws, and China (as a one of many examples) don’t have any strong privacy law (for foreign traffic), they is not a single guaranty about what they could do with the data.
The hypocrisy is about “protecting” high-school students (not children) from “bad” websites (that they obviously can, and do, access anyhow) but without any clear explanation of what is worse: porn, or leaked personal data that could be keep for decade.
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Not in GDPR countries.
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Yeah.. What’s the difference between having malware installed and having simple data collected and sent back by an app…
Maybe having access to the computer with malware now on it to use in cyber attacks.
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The VPN software would necessarily have permission to intercept all network traffic. If, for example, a scientific calculator app asked for that level of access, people would probably get suspicous. It shouldn’t be a huge risk to system security if the other apps use proper connection security, but it’d still be a privacy risk.
Will Whey They Ever Learn...
Schools trying to ban popular teen activities inevitably produces unintended consequences.
Example: The ban on dancing in “Footloose” led to Kenny Loggins being played on the radio approximately every 7 minutes. And was society better off as a result?
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Kenny Loggins >> Key Loggers >> Danger Zone
*When Will They Ever Learn?
Where’s the edit button?
Re: Where's the edit?
Thats my question.
Addressing an unintended consequence of a policy change is a good thing.
That’s kind of how policy works, yes. Same type of what-a-mole they play with things like cheating.
Wait, we can worry about data privacy risks, even outside of talking about a comprehensive data privacy bill? Crazy.
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No, treating the symptom of something is not a good thing compared to treating the cause of something.
Again, this is treating a symptom rather than the cause. If that’s “how policy works”, then the policy is broken.
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It’s better to treat the cause, if you can. But if you don’t have a good solution for the cause, treating the symptom is fine as a second-best solution.
There’s no magic solution to things like some students wanting to cheat (or wanting to goof off, etc). That sort of situation is normal in a lot of cases, and that’s not an inherent flaw with the anti-cheating policy.
If we had magic wands to make these things go away, that’d be better. But generally, we don’t.
'If we just tell them they can't do it that'll solve everything!'
Next you’re going to tell me that Abstinence Only isn’t effective sex-ed…
Ban students
So a school bans students from using social media, so students use VPNs.
Then the school bans VPNs, so students use cellular connections to get around the ban.
It seems like the only way to keep students from accessing “bad” things is just to ban students completely. If there are no students in the school, then there are no students accessing bad things. Problem solved!
Rental car GPT. Neat.