Privacy, Photos & Talking to Parents

What counts as personal data

Under the Personal Data Protection Act (個人資料保護法), a student's name, photograph, grades, health information, counseling records and family circumstances are all personal data. Schools may collect and use it only within the necessary scope of a stated specific purpose, having told families what that purpose is.

The practical translation for you: everything you know about a child, you know because of the job. It travels no further than the job.

The photograph question

This is the one foreign teachers get wrong most, and almost always with good intentions — a proud post about a great lesson.

There is a reason beyond the law. Some families have circumstances you will never be told about — a custody dispute, a protection order, a parent who must not know where the child is. Schools do not explain these to the foreign teacher, and they should not have to. Asking first is what makes it impossible for you to be the person who caused that harm.

Copyright: the classroom is not the internet

The Copyright Act (著作權法) is generous to teaching and much less generous to publishing.

• Article 46授課需要之重製
  A school and its teaching staff may reproduce published works within a reasonable scope for the needs of school teaching. That covers copying a page for your class.
• Article 52引用
  Quotation from published works is permitted within a reasonable scope for teaching, reporting, comment or research.
• The limit
  Putting the same material on a public website is public transmission (公開傳輸) — a separate right that classroom fair use does not cover. Legal in your classroom does not mean legal on your blog.

Playing a video or a song in your lesson is generally within teaching purposes. Downloading it, re-cutting it and re-uploading it is not. And your students' own work belongs to them — ask before you display it anywhere public, including inside the school.

Talking to parents

The 導師 is the school's channel to families. That is not bureaucracy; it is the person who holds the relationship, the Chinese, and the full picture of that child.

• A parent messages you directly
  Reply politely, keep it short, redirect substantive matters to the homeroom teacher — then tell your co-teacher that the contact happened. Never let them hear it from the parent.
• A parent asks about another child
  Decline. Another family's child is not yours to discuss, in any amount of detail, ever.
• A parent asks you to change a grade
  Not your channel and not your decision alone. Refer it to the homeroom teacher and tell your co-teacher.
• A parent asks for private tutoring
  Go back to Module 1: teaching outside your permitted employment needs a separate permit. Decline warmly and generally.
• Private channels
  Keep it out of personal LINE and Instagram entirely — the Module 5 boundary applies to parents as well as students.

The everyday leaks

Not one of these feels like a breach at the time. All of them are.

A mark book left open on a desk. Reading out scores in class order. A group chat where you name a student who is struggling. Telling one parent about another family's situation, kindly, to reassure them. A photo of the class posted from the airport on your last day. Answering a stranger's polite question at a dinner about which school and which class.

If something is already online

Take it down first, then tell your co-teacher or principal — in that order, the same day. Do not wait to be asked and do not quietly hope. A post removed by the person who posted it, reported voluntarily, is an ordinary correction. The same post found by a parent three months later is not.

One thing to do this week

Open your own social media and search your own posts for your school's name. Then look through your camera roll for photographs of identifiable students. Decide, for each one, whether you could show it to that child's parent and explain why it is there. Anything that fails that test, delete.