This week in health, we're talking about safety. The standard home, outside and school safety, y'know, the 'Don't open the doors to strangers, kids,' and 'never go outside alone,' safety. We're also talking about Internet safety. That's what's pissing me off.
Pretty much, our teacher told us anything we do on the Internet can become public. No duh. We learned that in third grade or whatever. But then we went on to tell us that if the school visits one of our Facebook or Myspace or whatever else pages, and find something 'inappropriate' they can call/tell our parents. And they can get us in trouble for it. And by inappropriate, they mean anything that wouldn't be in a PG rated movie. I'm sorry, but that's just crossing the line.
Other than this site, I don't have really anything that could they could punish me for. I don't post (or even take) raunchy pictures of myself. I cuss, but (unless it's in stories) not on the internet. So I'm not at risk. But honestly, I don't think it's their right at all to track us down on Facebook and look at our profiles. (I'm at a loss to figure out how they'd even do that. To see most of our profiles, you'd have to add us as a friend and most of us aren't stupid enough to add strangers.) School is a big part of our life, but it shouldn't dip into the internet and stuff. Don't get me wrong, if somebody is cyber bullying you, then they should get in trouble. And if you're posting nude pictures and are underage, then that's against the law. But most 'racy' pictures aren't racy. It's teenagers doing teenage stuff. As for cussing, we do that at school and don't get in trouble. So they're going to bust us for it on the internet? Call me insane, but that's crossing the line.
Then, for me, this whole site comes into play. If they ever figured out I was on here (and were able to sucessfully track me down), then they'd read romances full with some (not very graphic) sex scenes. One of my main characters does drugs and curses a lot. So they could bust me for all that. And I'm writing, for God's sake. That's something somewhat educational. And it pisses me off that they'd try to track us down and get us in trouble for something like this.
I know what you're going to say. 'Don't worry. They won't actually do it.' Um, they already did. A picture of some girls jumping up in their swimsuits that they deemed 'bad'. One year, they tracked down everybody in the grade. Or they tried to. And it really, really pisses me off that they'd do that. If I wanted the teachers to know everything about me, I'd track them down on Facebook and add all of them as my friends. As far as I'm concerned, it's an invasion of privacy.
[/rant]
Call me insane, but there's a fine line between school and home.
October 9th, 2009 at 03:40am