By Brendan Hamme
When students at Glendale Unified School District learned through news reports last year that their Facebook and other social media accounts were being monitored by the district through a third-party company known as Geo Listening, students and parents were shocked, and so were we.
Many saw the monitoring as invading student privacy and chilling off-campus speech. In response, Assembly Member Mike Gatto, along with coauthors Assembly Member Lorena Gonzalez and Senator Ricardo Lara, introduced AB 1442, a bill imposing limitations on the monitoring of students' social media posts by school and district officials. The governor signed the bill today, providing much needed regulation of social media monitoring by schools.
The new law, on which the ACLU of California worked significantly and which goes into effect January 2015, will require that:

• Districts, county offices of education and charter schools must first notify students and parents that they are considering adopting such a program and to allow for public comment at a regular board of education meeting or hearing.
• Monitoring and collection of information on social media by school districts are restricted to only information that is directly relevant to school or pupil safety.
• Districts must allow students to see exactly what information has been collected on them from social media and to correct or remove any of that information and otherwise mandates that the information be destroyed when the student turns 18 years old or is no longer enrolled at the district.
• Districts give notice of the program to parents and guardians.

Importantly, AB 1442 also prohibits third parties from selling or sharing information with anybody other than the district or from using the information for any other purpose, and requires destruction of the information when the contract is complete, the student turns 18 years old or the student is no longer enrolled in the district.

We urge students and their parents or guardians to be vigilant about their online privacy. If you oppose such monitoring, speak out at public meetings. If your school monitors your social media, ask for what information they are gathering and request its deletion. If the school refuses to provide the information or is gathering information that is not related to school or student safety, complain to the district and let us know about it.
Most importantly though, schools can only monitor information that is publicly available, so if you don't want your school monitoring what you say, make sure your social media accounts are set to private.
Brendan Hamme is staff attorney at the ACLU of Southern California. Follow ACLU SoCal on Twitter.

By Natasha Minsker, @nminsker
California had the chance to be a leader in requiring police to get a warrant to use surveillance technology. But Gov. Brown vetoed a bill, AB 1327, that would have done just that for police drones.
This is a big disappointment and Gov. Brown missed the mark with this veto.
AB 1327 would have provided basic statewide protections against abuse by police drones. Without it, cities and counties are left to figure it out on their own. So far, this has not gone well.
In San Jose, for example, it came to light this summer that the police department had acquired a drone in relative secret. In 2012 the Alameda County Sheriff tried to purchase a drone in secret.
The troubling trend of secrecy makes it challenging for the public to weigh in on drones and other surveillance technology. The lack of a statewide regulation puts an additional burden on cities and counties -- and on the public to demand privacy protections from their local leaders.
Absent a statewide warrant requirement, it's crucial that communities have a meaningful opportunity to weigh in on whether drones and other surveillance technologies should even be used at all. And, if they are, proper safeguards need to be in place.
In his veto message, Gov. Brown wrote that the bill's exceptions to the warrant requirement are "too narrow" and that it imposes requirements beyond the 4th Amendment and the strong privacy protections in the California constitution.
Great legal minds disagree with that assessment.
In a recent Sacramento Bee article, esteemed constitutional law scholar Erwin Chemerinsky wrote, "The warrant requirement long has been used to balance law enforcement needs and privacy interests. It should be applied to drones, and other emerging technology."
Chemerinsky and 40 other law professors wrote to Gov. Brown asking him to sign AB 1327, outlining privacy issues at stake and the importance of a warrant requirement for police drones.
To be sure, the courts will weigh in on this issue eventually. But it takes time for courts to work out legal protections involved with a new technology. In 2011 Gov. Brown vetoed a bill that would have required a warrant to search cell phones. This year the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against warrantless cell phone searches of arrestees. The governor's veto was wrong then, and it's wrong now.
In the meantime Gov. Brown's veto of AB 1327 leaves Californians vulnerable to police misuse of drones.
Without proper safeguards, including a warrant requirement, drones and other surveillance technology have the potential to be misused for racial and religious profiling. After what we've learned about mass surveillance by the NSA and various police misconduct in Ferguson, Missouri, the public isn't buying law enforcement's "just trust us" approach anymore.
Ultimately, law enforcement needs to explain to the public why and how they plan to use drones or other surveillance technology.
Here at the ACLU we are going to keep working hard for meaningful protections against spying by drones and transparency in all police surveillance.
Natasha Minsker is associate director at the ACLU of Northern California.