‘I like, stalk them on Facebook’: Teachers´ ‘privacy’ and the risks of social networking sites

Social networking sites (SNS), including MySpace and Facebook, and other media rich websites with social networking functions such as Bebo, Flickr and YouTube, offer new and varied ways to communicate for both students and teachers. This paper focuses on the complexities, particularly legal complexities, that may arise from teachers and students sharing social networks. For example, in October 2009, Queensland State School teachers were issued with a Code of Conduct prohibiting them from using SNS to contact or access students and mandating that any `private use´ of social networks by teachers must be kept `appropriate and private´. However, this interdiction is deeply problematic, especially as SNS are designed to increase the number of users and their connections and by their very nature resist being private. Drawing upon Australian and overseas examples, this paper describes a SNS landscape in which traditional notions of privacy are much harder to maintain and can have risks, including legal risks, for teachers.