One government says restrict. The other says you must not
On 28 July 2026 Australia's eSafety Commissioner told schools to post fewer identifiable photos of children and to move school imagery into a closed or restricted space. NSW Department of Education policy requires the opposite: school accounts “must not restrict access or be set as ‘private’ or ‘closed.’” 1,780 NSW schools follow that instruction, covering 637,818 students, in all 93 state electorates.
Every NSW government school, audited. Here's what the data shows.
A search for a Facebook presence associated with every NSW government school found that 1,780 operate public Facebook Pages. Visible to anyone on the internet. Indexed by search engines. Accessible to AI scrapers and facial recognition systems. 637,818 students attend these schools, in every one of the 93 NSW state electorates.
The pattern is consistent across the state: 83% of metro schools, 81% of inner regional, 82% of outer regional. This is not 1,780 individual decisions. It is what one clause produces when it says accounts must not be private or closed.
The audit accessed no Facebook page and viewed no photograph of any child. It relies only on Google's public index, which is the point: if a search engine can list these Pages, so can everything else that crawls the web.
One department. Three changes. No legislation.
This campaign asks nothing of your school. A principal following departmental policy is not the problem, and one school changing its settings fixes one page out of 1,780. The instruction is written centrally, administered centrally through the department's own Facebook Business Manager, and can be changed centrally.
Issue AI-era guidance under the exception the policy already has
PD-2011-0418-01 prohibits restricting a school account. The same clause then says: “This does not mean that a school cannot restrict access, set as private or closed, or suspend the school account from time to time if required to manage or address any risks or issues.”
So a school may already restrict its account to manage a risk. What no school has is a departmental statement that AI scraping and deepfake generation is such a risk. Without it, a principal acting on the eSafety advisory is departing from a written instruction on their own judgement.
The department can close that gap with guidance. No policy review, no consultation, no legislation. eSafety has already said whose job it is: “schools or school sectors can set common expectations and share practical guidance, reducing the need for each school to build its response from scratch.”
Amend "Keep the school account open"
Change the clause so that restricted or closed settings are permitted, and are the default, for accounts that publish images of children. Victoria's education department already encourages restricted access. NSW is the outlier in requiring open accounts.
Rebuild Permission to Publish
The current form is one binary choice covering newsletters, website, Facebook and media together. It has no expiry and mentions none of these risks. eSafety asks schools whether consent is “active, informed and current” and whether it covers social media specifically. This form fails all three tests.
Whatever brought you here, there's something for you
I'm not sure this is real
Straight answers to honest questions. Common doubts, addressed with evidence.
I want to push for the change
Enter your postcode, see the schools in your state electorate, and send your local member a letter in two minutes.
I need to explain this to someone
The regulator's words and the department's words, side by side. One minute to read, and neither of them is an opinion.
Show me the evidence
Senate testimony, Human Rights Watch reports, regulatory findings. Every claim sourced. Judge for yourself.
What the evidence shows
Five confirmed threats to children from public school Facebook Pages. None of this is theoretical. All of it is documented, sourced, and verifiable.
AI Training
Meta confirmed under oath to the Australian Senate that it scrapes every public post since 2007 to train AI. Children's photos are included. Australians have no opt-out.
Facial Recognition
Clearview AI scraped 50 billion+ photos from Facebook. The Australian Information Commissioner found it breached the Privacy Act. The database grew after the order to delete.
Deepfakes
AI-generated explicit images of 50+ schoolgirls at a Melbourne school. Created from their social media photos. Deepfake reports to the eSafety Commissioner are doubling year on year.
Training Datasets
Human Rights Watch found 362 identifiable Australian children in a single AI dataset, from less than 0.0001% of the data. Some photos came from school uploads.
No Consent
The NSW consent form is binary: all public publishing or nothing. It makes no mention of AI training, facial recognition, or deepfakes. It was written before any of this existed.
We banned children from social media. We're still publishing their photos on it.
In December 2025, Australia's Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act took effect. Platforms must prevent under-16s from holding accounts. 4.7 million accounts were removed. As a country, we decided social media is not safe for children.
Schools are still posting identifiable photos of those same children on those same platforms. Every week. On pages that are public by policy. Accessible to anyone on the internet. Scraped by the systems we just decided children need protection from.
The law protects children from being on social media. Nothing yet protects them from being published on it.
There is a second contradiction, and it sits inside the department's own procedures. The stated reason for requiring open accounts is to “reach a broader audience and build a stronger community”. A few pages earlier, the same document instructs schools not to use those accounts “as a primary method of communicating with parent or carers”, and to use email, the school website and school apps instead.
So the department has already decided Facebook is not how a school talks to its parents. The open setting is not serving the school community. What it adds is reach to everyone outside it.
“Posting fewer images of school students and personnel – or none at all – can reduce the risk. It cannot remove the risk completely because images may still be available from other public sources.” eSafety Commissioner, Sharing school imagery in the age of AI, 28 July 2026
“School accounts on public platforms must not restrict access or be set as ‘private’ or ‘closed.’” NSW Department of Education, Social media procedures PD-2011-0418-01, current
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Photos already scraped can't be unscraped. But one clause can stop it getting worse.
A federal regulator has now put in writing what schools should do. A state department still requires the opposite. That gap is not a technology problem or a school problem. It is a sentence in a procedures document, and departments change those when enough people ask.