Protecting Your Privacy On The Web
- The Risks
Here are three reasons why we need to consider how much personal information is intentionally or accidentally revealed. - The most obvious is the creepy stranger lurking on the internet that your parents always warned you about.
- Less obvious is the custody battle that may be taking place behind the scenes.
- Finally, there is the issue of student-on-student bullying – either this year, or somewhere down the road. (You google someone’s name, find some old student work and make fun of them about the content or writing quality.)
What kind of information is out there? Use the google search box to google your name, both in quotes, and without quotes, and see what you get.
Students are usually not technologically-savvy enough to manage their name on the internet. The internet has a long memory, and in fact, it can be very difficult to manage your brand online. Here are some of the pieces of personal information that can be inferred after going through a school website or classroom blog:
o (approximate) age or grade
o name (first, first and last initial, or full name)
o gender
o race / culture / religion
o friends and who they hang out with.
o name of their school, their teacher, and the approximate location of the city where they live in (by guessing the school catchment area.)
o where they will be Monday through Friday between approximately 9 to 3.
o recent classroom or school events.
o personality traits: shy, outgoing, low or high self-esteem, computer literate
How to Protect Your Identity
Its’ a fine balance between protecting your students’ personal information and giving credit to recognize and celebrate your students’ achievements. Ultimately it’s a joint decision that has to be made by all of the people involved: students, teachers, school administrators, and parents/guardians.
Here are some things to consider when you are trying to protect yourself when publishing work online in a classroom blog or school website:
- Consider publishing under generic names (i.e. student 8305) or pseudonyms. (Note that pseudonyms can still reveal personality traits.)
- Consider not publishing the school’s name, or linking to and from the school website.
- Moderate all posts and comments to remove any identifiable information. (Names, nicknames, family member names, etc)
- Consider hiding your blog from the search engines
- If you use a blog to publish your student work, consider turning off the update notification service.
- Consider publishing your work as “private posts”
- A blog uses something called an RSS feed to syndicate content around the world. Anyone can download an RSS reader or use Microsoft Outlook to subscribe to your classroom blog. When new posts are published on the blog, they automatically receive updates of the post. If you want to restrict the RSS feed to specific users, then you’ll need to install a plugin like Feed Keys.