BILL ANALYSIS Ó
AB 1442
Page 1
ASSEMBLY THIRD READING
AB 1442 (Gatto)
As Amended May 1, 2014
Majority vote
JUDICIARY 9-0 EDUCATION 7-0
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|Ayes:|Wieckowski, Wagner, |Ayes:|Buchanan, Olsen, Chávez, |
| |Alejo, Chau, Dickinson, | |Gonzalez, Nazarian, |
| |Garcia, Maienschein, | |Weber, Williams |
| |Muratsuchi, Stone | | |
|-----+--------------------------+-----+--------------------------|
| | | | |
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SUMMARY : Requires a school district that gathers and maintains
information about a student from social media to notify parents,
limit the information that it collects, and to destroy the
information when no longer needed, as specified. Specifically,
this bill :
1)Requires a school district, county office of education, or
charter school administration (school district) that considers
a program to gather and maintain in its records personal
information obtained through social media on any student
enrolled in the school district to notify the students,
parents, and guardians and provide an opportunity for public
comment, as specified, prior to the adoption of any such
program. In addition, a school district that adopts such a
program shall do all of the following:
a) Gather and maintain only information that was made
publicly accessible, as defined, and not including either
of the following:
i) Information that the school district knows or has
reason to believe was reposted or otherwise made
available by another party without the express consent of
the original author; or
ii) Any secondary information, including but not limited
to geolocation information, derived from content posted
to social media unless that secondary information was
intentionally made publicly accessible.
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b) Provide students with access to any personal information
about the student gathered or maintained by the school
district and obtained from social media, and the
opportunity to correct or delete information gathered or
maintained in violation of this bill.
c) Destroy personal information gathered from social media
maintained in its records within one year of a student
turning 18 years of age or within one year after the
student is no longer enrolled in the school district,
whichever is first, and notify each parent or guardian of
this policy.
d) If the school district contracts with a third party to
gather personal information from social media on any
student enrolled in the school district, then the contract
shall do all of the following:
i) Prohibit the third party from using the information
for its own purposes.
ii) Prohibit the third party from selling the
information or sharing the information with any person or
entity other than the school district.
iii) Require the third party to destroy the information
immediately upon satisfying the terms of the contract, or
within one year of a student turning 18 years of age, or
within one year after the student is no longer enrolled
in the school district, whichever is first.
FISCAL EFFECT : None
COMMENTS : In recent years, in California and elsewhere, parents
and school officials have confronted the problem of
"cyberbullying" - or the use of electronic media by one student
to harass, intimidate, or generally terrorize another student.
As students spend more time peering into their mobile devices
and communicating with each other via Twitter, Facebook,
Instagram, or the latest social networking application, the
opportunities for cyberbullying have increased. Glendale
Unified School District became interested in monitoring
cyberbullying and other harmful online activities after two
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students within the school district committed suicide in the
same school year.
Social media monitoring may be a reasonable response to
bullying, but according to the author and privacy advocates,
such monitoring raises significant privacy concerns. In recent
years, the Assembly Judiciary Committee has heard numerous bills
seeking to protect individual privacy by imposing limits on the
ability of businesses and government agencies to collect, use,
or share personal information. The Legislature has been
especially concerned with protecting the privacy rights of
minors. For example, last year's SB 568 (Steinberg), Chapter
336, Statutes of 2013, prohibited Web site operators and online
and mobile services from sending advertisements to minors for
products that they were not old enough to legally use or
purchase. SB 568 also permitted minors to remove or demand
removal of messages or images that they had posted online.
Concerns about the privacy and security of digital information -
of both minors and adults - were greatly heightened by the
recent and well-publicized data breaches involving Target and
other major retailers. Indeed, the Target breach prompted joint
hearings in both the Assembly and the Senate. One point of
consensus that emerged from those hearings is that, while data
breaches can never be completely prevented, the consequences of
data breaches can be greatly mitigated by limiting the amount of
personal data that is collected and stored - and thus available
to database hackers. In short, businesses and government
agencies should only collect as much information as is necessary
to complete a transaction or perform a designated function, and
the data collected should be deleted or otherwise destroyed once
it is no longer needed for a legitimate purpose. A second point
of consensus is that, to the fullest extent to which it is
practical, people should know what, when, how, and why data is
being collected about them.
This bill appropriately reflects these points of consensus by
requiring notice, limiting upfront collection, and requiring the
destruction of the information at a certain point.
Specifically, this bill would only permit the school to monitor
social media postings that were accessible to the general
public. It would not, for example, permit the school district
to gather content that the student intended to keep private or
only intended to share with a designated group of friends. The
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bill would require the school to notify students and parents of
any plan to gather social media content, and to provide an
opportunity for public comment before adopting such a program.
The bill would also permit a student to have access to any
information that the school maintains and demand that the school
correct or delete any information that is gathered or maintained
in violation of this bill's provisions. Finally, the bill would
require the school district to destroy any social media
information that it gathers and maintains within one year of the
student turning 18 years of age, or within one year after the
student is no longer enrolled in the school district, whichever
comes first. Recognizing that many districts may, like the
Glendale Unified School District, contract with a third party to
perform the monitoring, this bill would also impose similar
restrictions on the third party, and expressly prohibits the
third party from selling, sharing, or disclosing the information
to any entity other than the school district.
It is important to stress what this bill does not do. It does
not authorize schools to engage in any form of monitoring in
which they cannot already engage. Although schools, like any
other person or entity, have the right to access social media
information that is publicly posted and accessible, a school's
ability to use and act upon such information is limited by any
number of legal and constitutional principles. For example, a
school could not punish a student for social media postings if
those postings constituted protected speech under the First
Amendment, nor could a student be punished for his or her
postings if the punishment did not meet the grounds for
disciplinary actions set forth in Education Code Section 48907
et seq. If a school district maintains the information in its
school records, then the school district cannot disclose any
information from those records in violation of the federal
Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, or the parallel
privacy provisions in the California Education Code that
protects the privacy of student records. This bill would
similarly impose constraints if a school district adopts a
social media monitoring program that is not otherwise
prohibited.
Analysis Prepared by : Thomas Clark / JUD. / (916) 319-2334
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