<story><title>12-year-old sues school district over Facebook profile search</title><url>http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-57394877-71/12-year-old-sues-school-district-over-facebook-profile-search/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>joshmlewis</author><text>So this sort of happened to me last year while in my senior year of high school.&lt;p&gt;A friend and I started a Facebook group called &quot;Sleeping students of GHS&quot; and we had people send in pictures to an email address I created and we&apos;d upload them to the group page.  Which was quite interesting because we couldn&apos;t be held responsible for actually taking the pictures.&lt;p&gt;Well the group went viral in a matter of a few days, first a hundred, then a few hundred, then 2-3k.  And in a relatively small southern town, around 13k people, that&apos;s a pretty big deal.&lt;p&gt;It was crazy.  I felt like Julian Assange for a couple weeks.  Nervously posting things and worried about the school big dogs hunting me down.  (of course this wasn&apos;t anything like WL, but the same idea.)  Parents were starting to be like, &quot;Wait, why are these students sleeping? What are the teachers doing about this?&quot; and this in turn caused a big uproar in the school.  Schools hate bad publicity.  The next day I get called into the office and a couple assistant principals and a police officer were like, &quot;Do you have permission from all these students parents to upload these pictures?&quot; and I said, &quot;No. I didn&apos;t think you needed it.&quot;  They in turn told me that the school was liable for a law suit, yada yada, and that I need to delete it.&lt;p&gt;They had me login to my account in front of them and delete it.  THIS WAS MY BIGGEST MISTAKE.  Damn it.  I was furious with myself afterwards.  Lesson learned I suppose.  It didn&apos;t take long for an outsider to the school to approach me and make another joint account.  That way if it&apos;s outside the school they can&apos;t do anything.&lt;p&gt;At this point local news agencies were calling me and emailing me asking to interview.  It was on the front page of newspapers.  I learned that it is indeed not illegal to take pictures of minors in a public place and the school was just BS&apos;ing me to get me to delete it.  I was a little scared in that office. I was in contact with the ACLU and a digital rights lawyer in San Francisco, just in case they issued any kind of punishment toward me.&lt;p&gt;It went on for a couple more weeks, we even had tshirts made, and then bam, Facebook shuts it down.  No notice, no warning, just bam.  We get an email saying &quot;Your page was against our ToS, sorry&quot; and that was that.  It all ended in a haze.  To this day I wonder why Facebook shut it down. I tried contacting them but to no avail.</text></comment>
<story><title>12-year-old sues school district over Facebook profile search</title><url>http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-57394877-71/12-year-old-sues-school-district-over-facebook-profile-search/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dsr_</author><text>It&apos;s important to remember that rights are meaningless if they are not exercised and defended, and that often means uncomfortable placement of walls. Not every case will be as media-friendly as a 12 year old girl posting to Facebook that someone was mean to her. The Miranda decision that established the right to be told your rights when under arrest -- the right to remain silent and so forth -- well, Ernesto Miranda was found guilty of kidnapping and rape in the second trial. Not a great person.</text></comment>