Education Week - May 29, 2024 - 15

What Is Doxxing, and How Can Educators
Protect Their Privacy Online?
Keeping personal and professional information
separate can be difficult for teachers, experts say
By Sarah D. Sparks
The education profession relies on teachers being accessible to their students and families
and open to sharing with colleagues. But a little information can be a dangerous thing.
For one former middle school art teacher in Baltimore County, it started with a group of
students Zoom-bombing her class. But when a home address linked to her family became
public, she said pranks escalated to falsely calling emergency services, commonly called
" SWATing. "
" My poor 60-year-old parents were woken up to a full SWAT team in the middle of the
night, " said the woman, whose name is being withheld. " Thankfully, nobody was hurt and [the
police] quickly realized it was a hoax. "
" When I Googled my name after the incident, the very first site listed my address as my
parents' address, " said the woman, who left teaching in 2022.
While educators have always been vulnerable to student pranking, experts say the malicious
use and release of personal information is a rising problem for teachers, and legal protections
are not keeping up.
" Schools all across the country are all dealing with these issues [of teacher privacy protection] at
the same time, " said Ronn Nozoe, the executive director of the National Association of Secondary
School Principals. " There's no playbook for how to deal with this, so folks are having to invent
them on their own. "
Teachers often are higher-profile than other school employees, and public debates over
curriculum, LGBTQ+ protections, and other issues often put teachers in the crosshairs of
cyberattackers.
" Individual educators' social media has become more heavily scrutinized, and the kind of
thing that certain [cyberbullying] groups have grabbed onto, " said David Sallay, the director of
youth and education at the Future of Privacy Forum and a former chief privacy expert for the
Utah state department of education.
Yet educators are more likely to be threatened or actually doxxed by their students or parents
than outside groups, according to a nationally representative survey conducted this April by the
EdWeek Research Center.
One in 20 educators reported their students have threatened to or actually released private
information-including home addresses, photos, and social media posts-and an equal share
said parents have done the same.
While there are no federal data on private information releases, an annual survey by
the security firm SafeHome.org suggests educators' experiences are in line with those of
Americans more broadly. As of 2024, about 4 percent of U.S. adults surveyed reported they
had been the victim of a doxxing attack, and 1 in 5 victims said information about their
families had been shared.
Here's what educators need to know to protect
their information.
What is doxxing?
Doxxing-evolved from slang for " dropping
documents " -is cyberbullying in which someone
reveals or uses sensitive personal, financial,
or other information to damage or embarrass
the victim.
" The reality is that county records [of mortgage
information and political party information],
public databases like Spokeo, BeenVerified,
Spydialer, and other reverse search engines can
render you, me, and anyone else vulnerable to
doxxing because they can provide phone numbers,
addresses, family member names, and
more, " said Sameer Hinduja, a co-director of the
Cyberbullying Research Center and criminology
professor at Florida Atlantic University.
Doxxing can escalate to other harassment, Hinduja
said, including online or live stalking, SWATing,
or identity theft. For example, the American
Federation of Teachers collected nearly 12,000
signatures for a petition to the head of Instagram
to restrict anonymous school " confession " channels
on the social media platform in which students
post teacher and classmate pictures and information
without consent, often provoking harassment.
" Because 'confessions' accounts are anonymous,
they can quickly morph into vicious cyberbullying, "
said AFT President Randi Weingarten.
" Educators are often reluctant to talk about these
accounts because it brings more attention to the
rumors, bullying and their schools. And we also
know that sometimes teachers are the targets,
and their personal information is shared. "
Releasing personal information can also undermine
teachers in class discipline or engagement
with families, Sallay said.
What can educators do to safeguard their
information?
While some doxxers break into victims' private
Who's Behind Educator
Doxxing?
One in 20 K-12 educators
reported a student has
threatened to or actually
released personal information
to the community against
their will, according to a
nationally representative survey
by the EdWeek Research
Center. An equal share had
been threatened or actually
" doxxed " by parents, twice as
many as educators threatened
by community members
or personal connections.
Threatened
Threatened and
Information Released
files, much information is publicly available but
taken out of context-for example, a teacher's
comments in an adult social media group that are
then broadcast to students or the public. The best
protection, experts say, is to keep personal and
professional lives as separate as possible.
" You are a public figure when you're a teacher.
You might not feel like it, you're not running for
office, but you are a public figure, " Sallay said. " So
just try and be thoughtful of what are the materials
[you as a teacher] are putting there publicly. Ask
yourself, if this became public, if a group of parents
got a hold of this, what might they do with it? "
Sallay also advised teachers to conduct basic
*Results show responses from
teachers, principals, and district
leaders.
SOURCE: EdWeek Research Center,
April 2024
information audits-searching for one's name on
search engines, reviewing access to social media
accounts, and so on-regularly.
States have varying levels of protection for
online privacy in general and teachers are considered
public employees, making their records
more accessible than other workers'. Colorado,
for example, passed a law in 2022 allowing educators
to request to have personal information
like home addresses removed from government
websites if they or family members receive
safety threats-though not preemptively.
What should educators do if they are
threatened with doxxing?
DOWNLOADABLE: See more tips on how educators
can protect their privacy and deal with doxxing threats.
> edweek.org
If a student or parent mentions, for example, a
social media post or photo without threatening to
distribute it without permission, educators should
think through whether they would be comfortable
if the information was broadly distributed and
consider removing it.
If someone threatens to use or release data to
damage a teacher, the National Education Association
and AFT both advised their members
to document any communication from the person
making the threat, and specify whether the
person would have needed to break into private
accounts to get the information.
" I'm not the kind of person who is anxious or
living in perpetual fear. Even after the SWATing
attempt, I did my best to move on and continue to
do my job to the best of my ability, " said the former
Baltimore County teacher. But she now monitors
her social media and public information searches
and said she regularly uses information removal
services. While some companies remove information
for free on request, other firms charge to pull
down information across platforms.
" I'd just encourage teachers to not be naïve
about what their students are capable of and to
take extra precautions to avoid being targeted in
a harassment campaign, " she said.
What should school and district leaders do
to help?
Clear guidance for students and staff is critical,
experts say.
In the EdWeek Research Center survey, 41 percent
of district administrators said their school
system has a policy for dealing with students who
attempt to dox teachers. However, only 26 percent
of school administrators and 15 percent of teachers
said the same, suggesting a disconnect in how well
districts explain their guidance.
" Administrators need to specifically delineate
penalties for doxxing by students and make sure
that the entire student body is clearly aware of
this, " Hinduja said.
Administrators should work to limit the ways
students or parents can get personal information
on teachers. Sallay recommends districts not collect
databases of information like staff emails or
home phone numbers, to avoid consolidating access
to vulnerable information.
" You [as an administrator] might be coming
from a good place, but draw a line between personal
and professional life " in staff information
collected, Sallay said, " because if you are collecting
and that personal information becomes more
publicly available, someone's going to misuse it.
And most of the time, you don't really need it. "
Districts can also help educators engage with
school communities in safer ways. For example,
superintendents should encourage teachers to
post photos from class projects on official school
social media accounts rather than personal accounts;
provide work phones or internet-based
phone numbers for teachers to use when communicating
with students and families; and restrict
recording technology in schools.
" Students bringing in devices and recording or
videotaping is just so much more prevalent now,
because of smart devices in general, " Sallay said.
" So that is a vector that I think teachers need to be
aware of. "
Developing a school culture of respect and
responsibility is equally important, the NASSP's
Nozoe said.
" We're not going to ban our way to kids being
great digital citizens, " Nozoe said. " Some [technology
restrictions] are appropriate and we can
leverage those tools, but the larger goal is to make
sure that as they're developing, kids really understand
the difference between ethical and unethical
use of technology. "
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Education Week - May 29, 2024

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