School posts on Facebook could threaten student privacy
Nashville, Jul 18 (The Conversation) 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 specialises 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: We could view the posts of schools – including images of teachers and students – even when not logged in to our personal Facebook accounts.
The ability to access pages and pictures even when we were not logged in revealed that not only could schools’ posts be accessed by anyone, but they could also be systematically accessed using data mining methods, or new research methods that involve using computers and statistical techniques to discover patterns in large – often publicly accessible – datasets.
Since practically all US schools report their websites to the National Center for Education Statistics, and many schools link to their Facebook pages from their websites, these posts could be accessed in a comprehensive manner. In other words, not only researchers but also advertisers and hackers could use data mining methods to access all of the posts by any school with a Facebook account. This comprehensive access allowed us to study phenomena like violations of students’ privacy at a massive scale.
Risks are present The easy access to student photos that we encountered comes despite broader concerns about individuals’ privacy on social media. Parents, for instance, have expressed concerns about teachers posting about their children on social media.
Fortunately, our search of news coverage and academic publications did not reveal any harms that have come to students because their schools posted about them. However, there are a number of possible risks that identifiable posts of students could pose. For instance, would-be stalkers and bullies could use the postings to identify individual students.
Also, there are newer threats that students may face. For instance, the facial recognition company Clearview collects internet data – and social media data – from across the World Wide Web. Clearview then sells access to this data to law enforcement agencies, who can upload photos of a potential suspect or person of interest to view a list of potential names of the individual depicted in the uploaded photo. Clearview already accesses identifiable photos of minors in the U.S. from public posts on Facebook. It is possible that photos of students from schools’ Facebook pages could be accessed and used by companies such as Clearview.
Even though we are not aware of these things actually happening, that is not reason to not be concerned about it. At a time when our privacy is often threatened in surprising ways, as technology journalist Kara Swisher writes, “only the paranoid survive.” My fellow researchers and I think this cautious view – even a paranoid view – is particularly justified when it comes to students as minors who may not provide their explicit permission to be included within posts.
Millions of student photos available In our study, we used federal data and an analytical tool provided by Facebook to access posts from schools and school districts. We use the term “schools” to refer to both schools and school districts in our study. From this collection of 17.9 million posts by around 16,000 schools from 2005 to 2020, we randomly selected – sampled – 100 and then coded these publicly accessible posts. We determined whether students were named in the post with their first and last name and whether their faces were clearly depicted in a photo. If both of these elements were present, we considered a student to be identified by name and school.
For example, a student in a Facebook post whose photo includes a name in the caption, such as Jane Doe, would be deemed identified.
We determined that 9.3 million of the 17.9 million posts we analyzed contained images. Within those 9.3 million posts, we estimated that around 467,000 students were identified. In other words, we found nearly half a million students on schools’ publicly accessible Facebook pages who are pictured and identified by first and last name and the location of their school.
Assessing the risks While many of us already post photos of ourselves, friends and family – and sometimes our children – on social media, the posts of schools are different in one important sense. As individuals, we can control who can see our posts. If we want to limit it to just friends and family, we can change our own privacy settings. But people do not necessarily control how schools share their posts and images, and all of the posts we analyzed were strictly publicly accessible. Anyone in the world can access them.
Even if one considers the potential harm of this situation to be minimal, there are small steps that schools can take that could make a notable difference in whether that potential is present at all: 1. Refrain from posting students’ full names Not posting students’ full names would make it much more difficult for individual students to be targeted and for students’ data to be sold and linked with other data sources by companies.
2. Make school pages private Making school pages private means that data mining approaches similar to our own would be much more difficult – if not impossible – to carry out. This single step would drastically minimise risks to students’ privacy.
3. Use opt-in media release policies Opt-in media release policies require parents to explicitly agree to have photos of their child shared via communications and media platforms. These may be more informative to parents – especially if they mention that the communications and media platforms include social media – and more protective of students’ privacy than opt-out policies, which require parents to contact their child’s school if they do not want their child’s photo or information to be shared.
In sum, schools’ Facebook pages are different from our personal social media accounts, and posts on these pages may threaten the privacy of students. But using social media doesn’t have to be an either-or proposition for schools. That is to say, it doesn’t necessarily come down to a choice between using social media without considering privacy threats or not using social media at all. Rather, our research suggests that educators can and should take small steps to protect students’ privacy when posting from school accounts. (The Conversation) PMS PMS
Today, we are releasing Facebook Graph API v18.0 and Marketing API v18.0. As part of this release, we are highlighting changes below that we believe are relevant to parts of our developer community. These changes include announcements, product updates, and notifications on deprecations that we believe are relevant to your application(s)’ integration with our platform.
For a complete list of all changes and their details, please visit our changelog.
General Updates
Consolidation of Audience Location Status Options for Location Targeting
As previously announced in May 2023, we have consolidated Audience Location Status to our current default option of “People living in or recently in this location” when choosing the type of audience to reach within their Location Targeting selections. This update reflects a consolidation of other previously available options and removal of our “People traveling in this location” option.
We are making this change as part of our ongoing efforts to deliver more value to businesses, simplify our ads system, and streamline our targeting options in order to increase performance efficiency and remove options that have low usage.
This update will apply to new or duplicated campaigns. Existing campaigns created prior to launch will not be entered in this new experience unless they are in draft mode or duplicated.
Add “add_security_recommendation” and “code_expiration_minutes” to WA Message Templates API
Earlier this year, we released WhatsApp’s authentication solution which enabled creating and sending authentication templates with native buttons and preset authentication messages. With the release of Graph API v18, we’re making improvements to the retrieval of authentication templates, making the end-to-end authentication template process easier for BSPs and businesses.
With Graph API v18, BSPs and businesses can have better visibility into preset authentication message template content after creation. Specifically, payloads will return preset content configuration options, in addition to the text used by WhatsApp. This improvement can enable BSPs and businesses to build “edit” UIs for authentication templates that can be constructed on top of the API.
Note that errors may occur when upgrading to Graph API v18 if BSPs or businesses are taking the entire response from the GET request and providing it back to the POST request to update templates. To resolve, the body/header/footer text fields should be dropped before passing back into the API.
Re-launching dev docs and changelogs for creating Call Ads
- Facebook Reels Placement for Call Ads
Meta is releasing the ability to deliver Call Ads through the Facebook Reels platform. Call ads allow users to call businesses in the moment of consideration when they view an ad, and help businesses drive more complex discussions with interested users. This is an opportunity for businesses to advertise with call ads based on peoples’ real-time behavior on Facebook. Under the Ad set Level within Ads Manager, businesses can choose to add “Facebook Reels” Under the Placements section. - Re-Launching Call Ads via API
On September 12, 2023, we’re providing updated guidance on how to create Call Ads via the API. We are introducing documentation solely for Call Ads, so that 3P developers can more easily create Call Ads’ campaigns and know how to view insights about their ongoing call ad campaigns, including call-related metrics. In the future, we also plan to support Call Add-ons via our API platform. Developers should have access to the general permissions necessary to create general ads in order to create Call Ads via the API platform.Please refer to developer documentation for additional information.
Deprecations & Breaking Changes
Graph API changes for user granular permission feature
We are updating two graph API endpoints for WhatsAppBusinessAccount. These endpoints are as follows:
- Retrieve message templates associated with WhatsAppBusiness Account
- Retrieve phone numbers associated with WhatsAppBusiness Account
With v18, we are rolling out a new feature “user granular permission”. All existing users who are already added to WhatsAppBusinessAccount will be backfilled and will continue to have access (no impact).
The admin has the flexibility to change these permissions. If the admin changes the permission and removes access to view message templates or phone numbers for one of their users, that specific user will start getting an error message saying you do not have permission to view message templates or phone numbers on all versions v18 and older.
Deprecate legacy metrics naming for IG Media and User Insights
Starting on September 12, Instagram will remove duplicative and legacy, insights metrics from the Instagram Graph API in order to share a single source of metrics to our developers.
This new upgrade reduces any confusion as well as increases the reliability and quality of our reporting.
After 90 days of this launch (i.e. December 11, 2023), we will remove all these duplicative and legacy insights metrics from the Instagram Graph API on all versions in order to be more consistent with the Instagram app.
We appreciate all the feedback that we’ve received from our developer community, and look forward to continuing to work together.
Please review the media insights and user insights developer documentation to learn more.
Deprecate all Facebook Wi-Fi v1 and Facebook Wi-Fi v2 endpoints
Facebook Wi-Fi was designed to improve the experience of connecting to Wi-Fi hotspots at businesses. It allowed a merchant’s customers to get free Wi-Fi simply by checking in on Facebook. It also allowed merchants to control who could use their Wi-Fi and for how long, and integrated with ads to enable targeting to customers who had used the merchant’s Wi-Fi. This product was deprecated on June 12, 2023. As the partner notice period has ended, all endpoints used by Facebook Wi-Fi v1 and Facebook Wi-Fi v2 have been deprecated and removed.
API Version Deprecations:
As part of Facebook’s versioning schedule for Graph API and Marketing API, please note the upcoming deprecations:
Graph API
- September 14, 2023: Graph API v11.0 will be deprecated and removed from the platform
- February 8, 2024: Graph API v12.0 will be deprecated and removed from the platform
- May 28, 2024: Graph API v13.0 will be deprecated and removed from the platform
Marketing API
- September 20, 2023: Marketing API v14.0 will be deprecated and removed from the platform
- September 20, 2023: Marketing API v15.0 will be deprecated and removed from the platform
- February 06, 2024: Marketing API v16.0 will be deprecated and removed from the platform
To avoid disruption to your business, we recommend migrating all calls to the latest API version that launched today.
Facebook Platform SDK
As part of our 2-year deprecation schedule for Platform SDKs, please note the upcoming deprecations and sunsets:
- October 2023: Facebook Platform SDK v11.0 or below will be sunset
- February 2024: Facebook Platform SDK v12.0 or below will be sunset
First seen at developers.facebook.com
Before today (August 28, 2023), advertisers could not promote images and/or videos used in Instagram Stories as ads via the Instagram Marketing API. This process created unwanted friction for our partners and their customers.
After consistently hearing about this pain point from our developer community, we have removed this unwanted friction for advertisers and now allow users to seamlessly promote their image and/or video media used in Instagram Stories as ads via the Instagram Marketing API as of August 28, 2023.
We appreciate all the feedback received from our developer community, and hope to continue improving your experience.
Please review the developer documentation to learn more.
First seen at developers.facebook.com
Launching second release of Facebook Reels API: An enterprise solution for desktop and web publishers
We’re excited to announce that the second release of FB Reels API is now publicly available for third-party developers. FB Reels API enables users of third-party platforms to share Reels directly to public Facebook Pages and the New Pages Experience.
FB Reels API has grown significantly since the first release in September 2022. The new version of the APIs now support custom thumbnails, automatic music tagging, tagging collaborators, longer format of reels and better error handling.
FB Reels API will also support scheduling and draft capability to allow creators to take advantage of tools provided either by Meta or by our partners. Based on the feedback we received from our partners, we’ll now provide additional audio insights via the Audio Recommendations API and reels performance metrics via the Insights API.
Our goal in the next couple of releases is to continue to make it easier for creators to develop quality content by adding features like early copyright detection and A/B testing. We’re also excited to start working on enhanced creation features like Video clipping- so stay tuned to hear more about those features in the future.
Call-to-Action
If you are a developer interested in integrating with the Facebook Reels API, please refer to the Developer Documents for more info.
Not sure if this product is for you? Check out our entire suite of sharing offerings.
Tune in to Product @scale event to learn more about FB Video APIs and hear from some of our customers.
First seen at developers.facebook.com
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