A 12 year-old girl in Minnesota is suing her school because she says the school invaded her privacy…on Facebook. She says that school administrators forced her to turn over the password to her Facebook account and then they subsequently went through her profile very thoroughly.
The administrators requested her personal information after she had gotten in trouble for some posts she made on the social networking site. In one such post, she wrote that she hated one of the school’s adult hall monitors, and in another, a mother complained to the school that the girl was talking about sex on the site with her son.
So naturally instead of the school then going to this student’s parents to address the issue, they wanted to see the messages for themselves first, and this according to the ACLU violated her rights.
The student, only identified as “R.S.” was pulled out of class and forced to turn over her account information. “R.S. was intimidated, frightened, humiliated and sobbing while she was detained in the small school room” as three school employees poured over her page. None of them seemed to care that she was upset over it. R.S. says that her First Amendment right to free speech was violated, along with her Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable search and seizure. The school shot back, saying: “The district did not violate R.S.’s civil rights, and disputes the one-sided version of events set forth in the complaint written by the ACLU.”
School officials say that they had a right to scour her page because of their usage of social medial on school property policy, but in fact the student had used her own computer to communicate with her classmate at home after school hours.
What do you guys think? Does this girl have a case? Does Invasion of privacy apply here, or does the school have a right to do this?
