What You Can Do

Three conversations with your school. All practical. All free. All achievable right now.

You don't need to be a technology expert. You don't need to wait for legislation. There are three things you can raise with your school today, and each one meaningfully reduces the risk to your children.

1. Move to a private Facebook Group

The single most impactful change a school can make. Facebook Pages are public by design. They cannot be made private. Facebook Groups can be set to private, restricting content to approved members only.

Feature Public Page Private Group
Visible to anyone on internet Yes No
Indexed by search engines Yes No
Available to AI scrapers Yes No
Accessible to facial recognition Yes No
Membership approval required No. Anyone can follow. Yes. Admin approves.
Posts, photos, events, files Yes Yes
Community engagement Limited Stronger. All members notified.
Cost Free
This is the first step, not the solution

A private Group stops third-party scrapers and removes children's photos from public search results. But Meta still has access to everything posted on its platform, including private Groups. Read the honest breakdown of what each level of action protects against.

2. Stop publishing children's photos publicly

If the school isn't ready to move to a private Group immediately, the minimum ask is to stop posting identifiable photos of children on the public Page. The school can still post text updates, event information, reminders, and general school news without including children's faces.

This is not ideal. The public Page itself is still a risk vector. But it immediately stops new photos of children from entering the public domain.

3. Remove all past photos from the public Page

This is the one people forget. Stopping new posts is important, but every historical photo on the public Page is still publicly accessible right now. Still indexed by search engines. Still available to scrapers. Still usable as source material for deepfakes.

The school needs to go through the existing public Page and remove all posts containing identifiable student images. This is time-consuming but necessary. Photos already scraped into AI systems can't be recovered, but removing them from the public Page prevents future scraping and reduces the surface area of publicly available images of each child.

Don't just stop posting. Clean up the history.

A public Facebook Page with years of student photos is an archive of children's faces available to anyone on the internet. Even if the school stops posting tomorrow, that archive remains. Removing historical content is as important as changing what happens going forward.

How to raise this with your school

Raise it at a P&C meeting

Use the motion template below. Present the key evidence: Meta's Senate admission, the Human Rights Watch findings, and the deepfake incidents. The goal is a formal P&C recommendation to the school principal.

The P&C cannot direct the school. But a formal, well-evidenced recommendation from the parent body carries significant weight with principals and the Department of Education.

Talk to the principal

Share this site with the principal directly. Most principals will recognise the risk immediately. This is a duty-of-care issue, not a technology debate. The principal manages the school's official social media presence and has the authority to make changes.

Create the private Group and migrate

Create a new Facebook Group set to Private. Name it clearly. Set up admins from both the school and P&C. Post on the existing public Page directing followers to the new Group. Send the link via the school newsletter, email, and app. Allow 2 to 4 weeks for migration.

Archive the public Page and remove photos

Remove all historical posts containing student images from the public Page. You can archive or unpublish the Page entirely, or leave it as a minimal redirect to the private Group.

Update consent processes

Review the school's Permission to Publish forms. Consider whether the current binary consent (all public publishing or none) is still fit for purpose. This is a longer conversation, but worth starting.

P&C Motion Template

Copy and adapt this for your P&C meeting.

Item: School Facebook Page. Transition to Private Group

Background

[School name] currently operates a public Facebook Page for school communications and community engagement. Content posted on public Facebook Pages is visible to anyone on the internet without requiring a Facebook account or any connection to the school.

The issue

Since September 2024, it has been publicly confirmed that:

  1. Meta (Facebook's parent company) scrapes all public Facebook posts, including photos of children on adult/organisational accounts, to train its AI models. This was confirmed under oath to the Australian Senate by Meta's global privacy director. Australian users have no opt-out.
  2. Facial recognition companies including Clearview AI have scraped over 30 billion photos from Facebook, including children's images, to build biometric databases. The Australian Information Commissioner found this breached the Privacy Act.
  3. Human Rights Watch found 362 identifiable Australian children in the LAION-5B AI training dataset from a sample of less than 0.0001% of the data. Sources included school uploads.
  4. In June 2024, AI-generated explicit images of 50+ schoolgirls at a Melbourne school were created using their publicly accessible social media photos.

The NSW Department of Education's "Permission to Publish" consent form does not inform parents that their children's photos may be scraped for AI training, facial recognition databases, or used to generate deepfakes.

Proposed solution

Transition the school's Facebook presence from a public Page to a private Group, and remove all historical posts containing student images from the current public Page.

Motion

That the P&C strongly recommends the school transition its Facebook presence from a public Page to a private Group, and that all historical posts containing student images on the current public Page be removed, in order to protect students from AI data scraping, facial recognition harvesting, and other emerging privacy threats not contemplated by current consent forms.

Moved by: _______________ Seconded by: _______________ Result: _______________

Common questions

Won't we lose followers/reach?

You'll lose vanity metrics (follower count) but gain an engaged, verified community of actual parents and carers. Research consistently shows private Groups generate more meaningful interaction than public Pages.

Does the P&C have the authority to make this change?

The P&C cannot direct the school on operational matters. But a formal, well-evidenced recommendation carries significant weight. The motion is worded as a strong recommendation, not a directive.

What about prospective families?

The school website remains public. A minimal public Facebook Page can remain as a "shopfront" with general information and a link to join the private Group. No child's photo needs to be public for prospective families to learn about the school.

Will the Department of Education have a problem with this?

The NSW DoE social media procedures currently state school accounts "must not restrict access or be set as 'private'." This policy was written before Meta admitted to AI scraping, before the Clearview AI breach finding, and before the under-16 social media ban. It needs updating. Making a formal P&C recommendation is one way to start that conversation. Read the full policy breakdown.

What about other platforms?

The same principles apply to Instagram, TikTok, and any platform where the school posts identifiable student images publicly. Facebook is typically the primary platform for school communications, which is why we start here.

Share this with other parents

This affects every school in Australia with a public Facebook Page. The more of us who know, the faster we can protect our children.

See the evidence What government can do