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Sunday, 26 October 2014

Facebook profile picture revealed at school assembly


A 15-year-old says she was humiliated by a teacher who showed an enlarged picture of her in a bikini to more than 100 other students during a school assembly.
Children at Eggbuckland Community College in Plymouth, Devon, were shown the photograph taken from her Facebook profile to illustrate the pitfalls of posting private images online.
Unknown to the schoolgirl, who has not been named, staff had taken her swimwear photo off the internet. It was blown up and added to a portfolio of other pictures then shown during a packed school assembly.
Making an example of the girl at a school assembly was totally uncalled for, never mind the thought that a teacher  would go trawling on Facebook to find such images. The shock value of this event would have detracted from any lesson that pupils would have been expected to learn.  It`ll be a joke !

If it happened at assembly, surely the head teacher must have been involved. Could the pupil not have been talked to privately and warned that her Facebook profile was not on the privacy setting, if that was deemed so important? It makes you wonder about some teachers. Perhaps there are a few who should never be trusted with confidential information about pupils, and their families, which they now can access from school databases at the click of a mouse.

As well as some admirable ones, I`ve certainly met a few vindictive teachers in my time who didn`t seem to know where to draw the line. Overall I suspect there`s more to be concerned about in a school database, than there is about any image, freely chosen, and placed on a Facebook page. 

I wonder if the incident was documented in the girl`s file. It would probably make interesting reading and I certainly would advise the girl to take out a data subject access request, just in case.

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