But this year, with new faces in the Legislature and his wife in the House of Delegates, Young claimed victory in his effort to safeguard student privacy. The road to success wasn’t free of obstacles; the proposal’s passage came during the final week of the 90-day session, after a couple of rounds of amendment and negotiation.
Delegate Karen Lewis Young, Ron Young’s wife, said the finished product helps ensure that privacy laws evolve along with the rapidly changing digital world.
“I have a problem with Big Brother watching you unless there’s a really legitimate safety or security concern, and I find it just reprehensible that any college or university would make it a condition for admittance or that a club, organization or athletic team would make it a condition for participation,” she said.
The bill forbids college officials from forcing a student to accept their friend requests or otherwise provide a window into his or her social media activity. The students are also protected from any requirement to change their security settings or hand over their account usernames and passwords.
Civil liberties advocates hail the measure as a logical extension of traditional applications of the Fourth Amendment.
“Allowing coaches or universities to read what you post on social media that’s supposed to be for friends only is like giving them access to your diary or giving them access to your photo album that you have in your house,” said Sara Love, public policy director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland.
That doesn’t mean students and teachers can never be Facebook friends. The legislation states that a student can voluntarily connect with a college official. And a college can compel a student to grant access to a social media account that was opened at the school’s behest, according to the bill. School officials are also free to check out student information that is publicly accessible online.
A student whose rights under the bill are violated could demand up to $1,000 in damages from the school, according to the bill.
As the bill made its way through the Legislature, some higher education officials asked for an amendment that would enable them to request student passwords for safety or health reasons, Young said. However, he successfully resisted this change, arguing that it would effectively allow colleges and universities to sidestep the bill completely.
Where there is a genuine safety issue, authorities can get a warrant to peruse social media accounts, said Lewis Young, D-District 3A.
College and university representatives also worried that the bill would interfere with certain course assignments that might require students to post their work on social media accounts. Thanks to an amendment addressing these concerns, schools can ask students to create generic accounts for use in completing homework assignments.
Love said it’s difficult to get a handle on how many colleges spy on their students’ online lives. However, the practice surfaces most often in athletic programs, she said.
A fiscal analysis attached to Young’s bill states that more than two dozen institutions have hired social media monitoring companies to watch the accounts of student-athletes. While the same companies have contacted schools in Maryland, none so far has signed up with them, according to the fiscal note.
Young said colleges can adopt other approaches for encouraging students to be on their best behavior online.
“If you don’t want your player’s picture online with one arm around a girl and a whiskey bottle in the other ... sit down with your team and say, ‘Don’t do that stupid stuff,’” Young, D-District 3, suggested.
Though the proposal, set to take effect June 1, has cleared both sides of the Legislature, it still needs approval from Gov. Larry Hogan before it becomes law. Hogan’s spokeswoman said the governor is still reviewing the proposal and hasn’t decided whether he will sign it.
The measure isn’t the first online privacy bill that Young has sponsored. In 2012, he passed legislation that would prohibit an employer from demanding access to a worker’s social media account.
The educational privacy bill is groundbreaking in one sense, though; Young said it’s the first bill passed in the Maryland General Assembly that was sponsored by a husband-wife duo.
©2015 The Frederick News-Post (Frederick, Md.) Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC
