There's no privacy when you post things publicly on the internet.
There is a reasonable expectation to /not be stalked/ even when conducting yourself in an otherwise public setting. Calling this "privacy" is a loose application of the word, but we never really had the need to come up with another one before the information age made it economical to do this to everyone all the time.
That's the difference compared with someone stalking a person. We don't generally go out into public to allow others to follow us.
"A member of the public ends up reading it" is reductionist. The two are more or less technically interchangeable due to the cheapness of digital monitoring, but if you think that's all that matters you're completely missing the point: the issue that you're ignoring is how this is done systematically and with a particular intent. It is not like overhearing a conversation in the park, it like is hiding in the bushes with a tape recorder.
Total observation is socially and politically horrifying, but authoritarians like to take advantage of the fact that we never previously codified norms against it because it was resource prohibitive until the advent of computing.
It's not like that because people have a reasonable expectation that what they say in a conversation will only be heard by those in that conversation. Tweeting is the real life equivalent of standing on the table and shouting something with a bullhorn. There's no expectation of privacy there.
>Total observation is socially and politically horrifying
It's not "total observation". It's observation of things they explicitly choice to make public.
Though true, there is an important caveat here: These are teenagers. Though their bodies may appear to closer to an adult's than a child's, their brains and expereinces are still only 16 years old. They are still learning. Combine that with Texas' #39 ranking in education [0] and it should come as no suprise that these teenagers are mis-infomed as to what counts and public and what counts as private. Instead of punishment/surveilance, we should perhaps try to teach and be patient.
[0] https://www.sacurrent.com/the-daily/archives/2019/01/21/texa...
Arguably, making material posted by children on the internet public without approval of a responsible adult should itself be considered a dnagerous privacy violation, given the history of such material being leveraged for cyberstalking and cyberbullying—not exclusively by school administratoes whose zeal exceeds their judgement and competence, but also by other children and by adults other than school administrators—and also those seeking targets to groom for sexual abuse.
> In 2016, the company expanded that analysis to students' school email accounts, monitoring all messages sent over district networks.
> Gaggle monitors the digital content created by nearly 5 million U.S. K-12 students. That includes all their files, messages, and class assignments created and stored
> "opened a Google Doc, wrote down concerns about a boy in class acting strange, then typed every bad word they could think of"
I can see both sides of monitoring school equipment, or at least maintaining the ability to access it, but I don't believe most people here would consent to active content monitoring of every email, document, message, and drafts of documents even on workplace devices