Schools failing to keep restricted students out of online photos

Parents and schools are facing growing risks around children’s photos online, as artificial intelligence makes images easier to manipulate, search and reuse. 

Earlier this month, Takaro School in Palmerston North and Pāpāmoa Primary School revealed they had stopped posting student photos on Facebook, citing concerns about children’s privacy and the lack of control over images once they are online. 

New research released to Newstalk ZB suggests schools are struggling to manage those risks, with 68% of participating schools having accidentally published an image despite consent or privacy restrictions. 

Just 12% were confident they could find and remove an image after it had been published. 

The research, led by Christchurch technology company Hail, found 61% had seen an increase in students requiring image restrictions, while 53% relied on spreadsheets, staff knowledge or other manual processes to manage those restrictions. 

Hail founder and chief executive Stuart Dillon-Roberts said schools were facing a very different digital environment from five or 10 years ago. 

“There are tools out there that can review all content, find images through faces, manipulate images. It’s pretty alarming.” 

It comes as Netsafe sees an increasing number of deep-fake reports involving schools – with students using tools to “nudify” their teachers or peers. 

Dillon-Roberts said schools are often relying on staff to manually check whether students could appear in photographs, with consent information spread across enrolment forms, student management systems, spreadsheets and printed lists. 

Hail founder and CEO Stuart Dillon-Roberts in the classroom. 

That could mean the person publishing a newsletter or social media post did not have the necessary restrictions in front of them. 

He said the number of platforms schools used to communicate with their communities made the problem harder to manage. 

One school Dillon-Roberts spoke to had 12 different Instagram channels, including accounts for its rugby and netball teams and arts department. 

“There’s not one single platform in place where you can do that from and that gap is causing images to be shared across channels that they find hard to manage and control.” 

The findings have prompted Hail to develop Hail Image Privacy, a service designed to help schools identify and protect students whose images should not be published. 

Dillon-Roberts said the company had scanned 572,000 images shared by schools across Facebook, Instagram, websites, newsletters and apps in the first few weeks of the service being available, identifying and automatically blurring or removing images of 859 students. 

The system uses digital fingerprints of students’ images to identify possible matches across published content. 

“We’ve taken that image, created a digital fingerprint and applied that across those 572,000 images and if we find one, we automatically blur that face.” 

The system can also search previously published content if a student’s privacy circumstances change, Dillon-Roberts said. 

He said schools should not necessarily have to stop sharing photos of students altogether. 

“I don’t believe the answer here is for schools to stop sharing that information, but to have a better way to improve how they’re finding and removing student images.” 

Jaime Cunningham is a Christchurch-based reporter with a focus on education and general news. She joined Newstalk ZB in 2023 after working as a sports reporter at the Christchurch Star.