The way Chris Frydrych tells it, monitoring schoolkids’ public social media posts and then reporting questionable activities about them daily to school officials is an unquestionable net positive.

So his new startup, Geo Listening, does just that. Geo Listening looks for social media posts that deal with depression, despair, online bullying, hate speech, or other words and phrases that may indicate a possible violation of school codes of conduct—whether it's by a student or someone in and around a school’s location.

Last month, Geo Listening even signed a deal with the Glendale Unified School District located north of downtown Los Angeles. Their agreement became the first publicly confirmed partnership between the company and a school district. Glendale will pay $40,500 for Geo Listening to monitor posts by 13,000 students across its eight middle and high schools for an academic year.

“If our service gets kids to privatize their pages, that’s all a positive for our kids and our society,” Frydrych told Ars. He noted that the service would not catch posts that are locked down as private.

Geo Listening—based in Hermosa Beach, California, a small beach town just south of the Los Angeles International Airport—is not given a list of student names. Rather, it is scanning posts across Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and other online services, searching for certain keywords and location information that would tie a person to the school community. Relevant data is then presented in a daily report to school officials.

“All of the individual posts we monitor on social media networks are already made public by the students themselves,” Geo Listening writes on its website. “Therefore, no privacy is violated.”

The company’s privacy policy further states:

Geo Listening’s service processes, analyzes, and reports only publicly available data that aligns with school district procedures and board policy related to student conduct and safety. The Geo Listening system takes into account frequency and severity of a student’s posts that include indicators relating to bullying, cyber-bullying, hate and shaming activities, depression, harm and self harm, self hate and suicide, crime, vandalism, substance abuse, and truancy. Geo Listening does not circumvent any personal privacy settings on the platforms where it indexes content. The Geo Listening Services are intended solely to collect and process publicly available information.

"We were able to save a life"

The entrepreneur claims that by July 2014, the service will be available at “3,000 school sites” across the world, the majority being in North America. (Frydrych distinguishes school sites to include school and district-related facilities, like a bus depot or a swimming pool, that may technically be off-campus.)

“If we find a post, and we report it to the school, and we let them know that this is behavior that is depicting despair, and here is the information that we were able to find in the public domain, we give that to [school officials],” he added.

Frustratingly, Frydrych declined to provide any technical details of the service. He wouldn't share an example of the types of reports that would go to school officials, though he specifically denied the company is using scraping or facial recognition technologies.

“We have various technologies methods that we use. They are all legal and publicly available,” Frydrych said. “We’re monitoring social networks; our methodologies allow us to know who is and who is not a stakeholder of a particular school, and that’s how we determine what we report to the school district.”

The Glendale Unified School District did not respond to Ars’ request for comment.

However, the school district's superintendent told CNN that an earlier pilot program with Geo Listening helped a student who was discussing suicide online.

"We were able to save a life," Richard Sheehan told the news channel. "It's just another avenue to open up a dialogue with parents about safety."

Surveillance is surveillance is surveillance

It remains clear, however, that the company is capturing data—likely location-based—about people besides students.

Ars asked Frydrych if a public tweet from a non-student saying “Drinking coffee across the street from Glendale High School” would turn up in his system. He said that data would not be immediately reported, but that it could be retained for future reference.

“If you did something later on, and then we needed to see if there was a trend or pattern, we would be able to access the day you had coffee, but again, we’re nine months in, and we haven’t had a lot of scenarios,” he noted.

It’s also unclear exactly how this type of social media scanning, data analysis, and retention would occur over time, particularly during school holidays or after a student has left the school district. It could be the case, if this company continues its arrangement with districts like Glendale, that Geo Listening could retain 12-years'-worth of social media data from particular students.

“That policy being developed is that we’re looking into what the industry best practices are,” Frydrych noted. “We have a potential life span within our sphere of responsibility of 12 or 13 years of a student. I don’t think it’s likely that we’re going to be holding data for that long. We will adhere to the law and we will adhere to what the industry best practices are so we can best serve our clients. The duration of that storage, nine months in, is still being developed as to what the end timeline is going to be.”

Privacy advocates have raised some notable questions about how this service would work in practice.

“If they're acting on behalf of the government, [there's a] serious possibility that their action is ‘state action’ subject to the federal and state constitutions,” Lee Tien, a staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Ars by e-mail.

“More generally it matters to me that this is being done by/for a public school, apparently with no or little notice to parents or students. I would ask, what business is it of the school's what my child does on Facebook? Does the school think it has a general roving commission to conduct surveillance on students outside of school? (Surveillance = deliberate or intentional practice of gathering information, often covertly.)”