Teacher fired for Facebook pics of wine

[KittyKitten]

Facebook and Twitter, ruining lives one page at a time. I am willing to bet that she is 'friends' with a student on facebook (because it is so kul), or friends with a teacher who is friends with a student. Never 'friend' your students on facebook. Teachers (even college instructors) get bad wrap for doing the smallest things, but doctors, lawyers, athletes can smut themselves all over the place, and it's okay.

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Did the Internet Kill Privacy?

(CBS) The simple request for PRIVACY PLEASE sounds almost quaint in the age of full body scans and Facebook. And even for those intent on maintaining their privacy . . . pitfalls abound. Our Cover Story is reported now by Erin Moriarty of "48 Hours":

The pictures were exactly what you'd expect from a European summer vacation: Cafes in Italy and Spain, the Guinness brewery in Ireland. So 24-year-old Ashley Payne, a public high school English teacher in Georgia, was not prepared for what happened when her principal asked to see her in August 2009.

"He just asked me, 'Do you have a Facebook page?'" Payne said. "And you know, I'm confused as to why I am being asked this, but I said, 'Yes.' And he said, 'Do you have any pictures of yourself up there with alcohol?'"

In fact, the picture that concerned the principal - showing Payne holding a glass of wine and a mug of beer - was on her Facebook page. There was also a reference to a local trivia contest with a profanity in its title.

Payne was told a parent of one of her students called to complain. And then, Payne says, she was given a choice: resign or be suspended.

"He told me that I needed to make a decision before I left, or he was going to go ahead and suspend me," she said.

She resigned. Attorney Richard Storrs is fighting to get Payne's job back.

"It would be like I went to a restaurant and I saw my daughter's teacher sitting there with her husband having a glass of some kind of liquid," Storr said. "You know, is that frowned upon by the school board? Is that illegal? Is that improper? Of course not. It's the same situation in this case."

But here's the really troubling part: Payne had used the privacy settings on Facebook. She thought that only her closest friends could see her vacation photos or her use of the "B" word.

"I wouldn't use it in a classroom, no," she said. "But Facebook is not the classroom. And it's not open to the students of my classroom. They are not supposed to see it. I have privacy in place so they don't see it."

Privacy?

What Ashley Payne or anyone of us who uses the Internet has to realize is this: Today our private lives are no longer so private.

"When we talk about a right to privacy, what we are really talking about is the right to control information we consider to be private," said Frederick Lane, an attorney and author of "American Privacy."

Read more at

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/...html?tag=stack