Social media monitoring is a huge industry at the moment, which I can say from first-hand experience. Lots of businesses, individuals, and organizations want t

Social media monitoring is a huge industry at the moment, which I can say from first-hand experience. Lots of businesses, individuals, and organizations want to know what is being said about them or their field. Even though no company providing these services can have perfect coverage (not even a perfect coverage of public internet communications), or perfect accuracy (generally it boils down to what you can express with search facets and boolean expressions), they can very aggressively sell the capability to people and organizations, because the 'idea' makes sense, and the fear/need is genuine - maybe there are relevant good/bad things happening out there that we need to know about. I think this may be the real story here: there are private companies incentivized to sell surveillance of public communications, regardless of end-result quality for the customer, and education is just one of many places where that is relevant. I don't think this is going to change - we now take for granted that search engines can see what is on the public web, and the same will become true of public social media -- although these tools are (generally) not yet as well known to the public as Google web search. I'd personally really like to see distributed and private social communications technology to take off, so that this kind of legitimized spying becomes near-irrelevant, and I think there are big opportunities there - but we're not there yet and there'll be some interesting ground to navigate in the meantime.