Why social media should not be monitored?

During school hours, I give all my time and attention to school. But once classes are over, I need my privacy. I don’t want my school administrators to be reading things that are intended for my friends and family. That’s why I don’t think schools should monitor students’ social media. Teens need a balance of school time and personal time, and social media should be something that we can have for ourselves.

When schools start monitoring social media accounts, they restrict what students share and express. A lot of students turn to social media as a place to communicate their feelings. I know I’m not the only one who would feel pressure to censor what I post if I knew administrators were reading my messages. I don’t want to have to worry that every private joke or sarcastic comment I make might be misinterpreted and potentially get me in trouble.

Some schools claim that monitoring students’ social media could alert school administrators to students who are bullying others or who might even be a threat to the school. These are great goals, but I believe they’re unrealistic. The truth is, many schools already have a hard time keeping track of everyone’s official school email accounts. Most schools simply don’t have the time or the resources to monitor every student’s various social media feeds.

As a result, schools that do monitor social media often depend on algorithms to search for keywords or phrases. We all know it’s hard enough for human adults to understand the nuances of teen slang and shorthand. How could an algorithm tell the difference between a harmless joke and an actual cause for alarm?

Instead of monitoring our social media, schools should teach students to behave safely and responsibly both online and in real life. If schools taught us how to combat cyberbullying, treat each other with respect and empathy, and help a friend who is going through a rough time, they could address the root causes of many of the problems schools monitor social media for, while also allowing students to retain a degree of privacy.

People today live in a virtual online aquarium, and chances are good that one of the people watching you is probably your current or potential employer. According to job site CareerBuilder, 52% of companies now check job applicants’ social media profiles before hiring them, up from 43% just a year ago.

On one hand, it’s understandable. After all, it can be embarrassing for a business if one of its representatives posts offensive content or does something illegal via social media. Employers can even get into legal trouble for their workers’ actions. Advocates of the practice say that it’s necessary to protect companies’ reputations, confidential information, and is an inevitable byproduct of the Internet age, according to the Wall Street Journal.

But does monitoring of employees’ social media really protect a company or can it do more harm than good?

First, the argument that companies need to keep tabs online to ensure that their employees refrain from inappropriate or illegal behavior doesn’t really hold. While it’s conceivable that some low level silliness, such as posting a picture of yourself dancing on a table, could be prevented by employer monitoring, more serious infractions are unlikely to be shared on social media and therefore never appear on the radar of the company anyway.

In addition, when job candidates or employees know that they are being watched, they can restrict access to certain posts, set up dummy profiles to fool companies, or otherwise throw up smokescreens. This is particularly true of millennials, who are technologically adept at controlling and manipulating their online avatars. The point is, the limited preventative effect of social media monitoring may not be worth the time and expense required for companies to do it.

There is also the problem of bias. Americans today are arguably more socially and politically conscious than previous generations and actively use social media to convey their thoughts, debate important topics, and fight for causes. In some cases, employers may even be supportive, such as if a job candidate works tirelessly to raise money for breast cancer research, but in other cases, there is a real danger of people being penalized for their personal views on things like politics, race, or religion.

Even if a company itself is neutral, the subjective feelings of the person tasked with monitoring employees’ social media could easily lead to discrimination, especially in the highly polarized environment of the U.S. People should be able to share their views on gay marriage, for example, with their friends on social media, without running afoul of an employer who disagrees with them. Recognizing that in essence this is an inadvertent violation of laws that prohibit discrimination on the basis of race, political preference, gender etc, employers should at the very least factor this into their social media policies and put safeguards in place to prevent against it. The harm caused by bias to workers is immense but so are the potential legal consequences for companies.

Finally, by looking over workers’ shoulders, companies could stifle the most important trait that can benefit a business: creativity. As innovation becomes increasingly necessary in a hyper-competitive business landscape, this factor can be crucial for a company’s success.

Social media, for those who use it avidly at least, can be a medium to express our personality – for who we are – which is naturally linked to our creativity. Companies that foster creativity are more profitable and 50% more likely to be market leaders than their peers, according to the Harvard Business Review. Yet some businesses fail to make the connection between suppressing their employees’ online freedom and restricting their creativity.

There is no doubt that companies are within their rights to expect compliance with some common-sense social media etiquette. However, there is a vast difference between asking for employees to exercise good judgment and hovering over their Tweets like Big Brother. The latter can erode a necessary sense of trust between companies and their workers and undermine loyalty. Just as an employee or a job candidate needs to trust that a company has integrity and is worth working for, the company needs to show its people that it trusts them to behave like responsible adults.

By allowing workers to live their personal lives without intrusion, smart businesses can make a powerful statement; namely, that they accept them for who they are, treasure their professional contributions to the company, and want them to be happy and fulfilled outside as well as inside the office. This, in turn, would inspire loyalty and boost productivity in the workforce, and make those companies more profitable.

Kumar has worked in technology, media, and telecom investment banking. He has evaluated mergers and acquisitions in these sectors and provided strategic consulting to media companies and hedge funds.

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Many parents — maybe even the vast majority of them — will disagree with what I’m about to say. But here goes: As parents, we should never routinely monitor our child’s internet use. We shouldn’t browse through social media accounts, read their texts or emails, use a tracking device on a child, track their cellphone, monitor their text messages, or track their location. We shouldn’t expect them to hand over the passwords to their online profiles and email accounts.

Sound crazy? Let me explain.

I firmly believe that children need to learn how to manage their own online presence — what to say, share, download, upload, and what not to say, share, and upload. As parents, we have a duty to teach our kids how to be good digital citizens, just like we’re responsible for showing them how to behave appropriately offline. Relying on cyber-spying is, in a way, an admission of failure. It’s at least a failure of communication and certainly a failure of teaching.

The reality is that most kids know a lot more about technology than their parents. They will find a way to hide their online activities if they’re really motivated, and if they don’t know how, Google is always here to help.

Besides, most of the chats and posts your kids are making are rather routine and, honestly, quite boring. The time it takes to go through their endless online chatter is unwieldy and unlikely to reveal anything important.

Of course, as a parent of three kids, I understand why parents want to monitor their children’s online activity. The internet has its dark places, and we’ve all read media accounts of kids being victimized. They can be bullied by classmates. They can be lured by online predators trolling Snapchat, Kik, Afterschool, and other anonymous chat apps.

They can make bad decisions like sharing photos with only “one friend” that quickly finds itself viewed by everyone at school. They can be cyberbullies themselves. Besides being victimized, they can also be exposed to all kinds of inappropriate content, from adult websites to foul language and inappropriate videos. I understand that even though many parents completely trust their own children’s online activities, they don’t trust the random people they might be chatting with. Maybe it’s some child molester or just some creep looking for some kicks at our kids’ expense?

I understand. As a tech entrepreneur, I surf the web all day, every day. I know it’s not all sunshine and rainbows. I also know that many of the dangers have been overblown by the media. I know that most teens will never be the victim of an online predator, they will not be kidnapped, and their lives will not be destroyed by seeing the F-word or a naked picture online.

My point is that by constantly monitoring our kid’s phones, we allow ourselves to do things that we would have never have tolerated from our own parents. For example, letting them reading our private journals would have been absolutely off-limits. It would have been unacceptable for them to pick up the phone in the kitchen and listen in on our calls. We would think them insane if we caught them hiding behind some bushes watching us hanging out with our friends or driving behind us watching our every move, in the event someone tried to kidnap us.

And yet, this is exactly what many parents want to do digitally and more, if possible.

Did America really become this unsafe for our kids in the past few decades? Are we actually helping our children to make better decisions by electronically hovering over them? Are we building a lifelong relationship of trust with our kids by cyber-snoopingon them? The answer to all of these questions is an absolute NO.

When we were kids, our parents told us, again and again, to never talk to strangers, never take candy from random people, never get into someone’s car, always look both ways when crossing the street, and other important and life-saving tips. Those same tips apply today only in the online world. A stranger is a stranger even when they have a cute avatar!

No amount of spying on our kids is going to make them safer. In fact, it can lead to a host of unwanted consequences, like building mutual distrust between you and your children. It can backfire and encourage them to try even harder to hide risky behavior because they know you’re looking for it.

Yet, surveys say it’s quite common for parents to digitally snoop on their kids. According to a recent Pew Research study, more than 60 percent of parents monitor what websites their children are visiting and what they’re doing on social media. Another 35 percent of parents actually have the passwords to their kids’ social media accounts.

Imagine if someone invented an app that allowed parents to secretly turn on the microphone on their kids’ phones like the CIA and NSA can apparently do? This app can then send parents a transcript of every conversation that their kids have, wherever they are. How about listening to every phone conversation they have? Get a complete transcript of the call, who they talk with and their relationship? After all, we can now track their exact location, why not every conversation? I’m sure there are plenty of parents who can rationalize this level of spying. After all, if we can track every conversation, every call, every text message, and every step our kids take, we can protect them from the harsh reality outside, right? Wrong.

Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

I created unGlue because I believe the best way to teach my kids about anything is to give them the tools to learn how to do it themselves. Technology has a place in helping parents and their children become smarter about the digital world — both its benefits and its dangers. It is our role as parents.

My point is to remind parents that they shouldn’t blindly rely on any solution to keep their kids safe, rather they should play an active role.

Technology can help but we should build an open, honest, and trusting relationship with our children, which will lead them to us when they experience something inappropriate online. That’s what we expect them to do in their offline life, it should be the same in their online life.

Alon Shwartz is the co-founder & CEO of unGlue, co-founder of Docstoc (acquired by Intuit), and father of three. Check out unGlue at the app store and on Google Play. This article was syndicated from Medium.

This article was originally published on Aug. 1, 2017