schülerVZ
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| the student directory | |
| Online community for students | |
| languages | German |
| operator | poolworks (Germany) Ltd. |
| editorial staff | Dennis Bemmann, Ehssan Dariani |
| user | approx. 200,000 (as of April 2013) |
| On-line | February 28, 2007 (currently switched off on April 30, 2013) |
| http://www.schuelervz.net/ | |
schülerVZ (short for student directory ) was an online community for schoolchildren and, in addition to studiVZ and meinVZ, a project of the VZ networks . The social network was founded in February 2007 and was the second of the three VZ networks. The project was based on the studiVZ platform, but unlike meinVZ, it was not linked to the two projects.
On April 8, 2013 schülerVZ announced in a message to all users that it would be switched off on April 30, 2013. The users were thus given time to save their data. According to VZ-Netzwerk, the reason for the discontinuation is the migration of many users to competitors such as Facebook or Twitter . In fact, schülerVZ was discontinued on May 1, 2013.
history
schülerVZ was developed as a counterpart to studiVZ for schoolchildren and opened on February 28, 2007 after a longer beta phase . In order to avoid abuse, it was only possible to register there at the invitation of a schülerVZ member.
The project was limited in its use to students from ten (previously twelve) years. Adults are expressly excluded from use; The profiles of members over the age of 21 have been removed. According to its own information, the website had over 5 million users, which corresponded to almost 70 percent of the total of around 7 million German-speaking students of this age group. According to statistics from January 2008, the site reached 111 million views with 2.7 million users, from which one can conclude that on average each member visited his site daily.
The enormous success of the website was astonishing. Dozens of older platforms such as the Netztreff in the SWR Children's Network or the tivi -Treff from the ZDF Children's Television as well as the chat of the public youth radio Ö3 or LizzyNet are especially established for girls for children and young people . In comparison to Myspace or Facebook, schülerVZ had only a few features. The reason for the success of the website is seen as the approach that the members were assigned via the school they attended, so that a student could also get to know other students in his school without having to go the problematic way of addressing young people directly. Furthermore, friendships could be cultivated beyond the direct school attendance and thus also after a change of school in daily contact. The “security” that no adults have “access” to the community was also a factor in the success , according to media educator Markus Gerstmann from the Bremen ServiceBureau Jugendinformation .
schülerVZ established itself due to the specialization for students on the same level as spickmich, among others .
With the establishment of Facebook in Germany, schülerVZ, like all other VZ networks, lost a large number of users (see user numbers). schülerVZ then had to adjust its strategy and tried to withstand the competition by making intensive changes to the platform. The software was revised, the design renewed and games were integrated on the site. The operators initially assumed the perspective of schülerVZ despite Facebook, but were still unable to stop the migration of users. In June 2012 it was announced that the site would be restarted at Idpool.de at the end of the year .
On April 30, 2013 schülerVZ went offline.
In April 2020, the makers of the VZ networks started a relaunch under the name VZ.net, which now unites all known VZ networks.
User numbers
The number of users of schülerVZ fell relatively sharply due to the competition from Facebook. In the months of September to October 2011 alone, the network recorded a decrease of 36% in the Alexa traffic ranking.
Functions
The system was part of the so-called social software , but in contrast to the two other offshoots of the VZ networks, it had more variable setting options. Among other things, it offered the following functions:
- The choice of a school that the user is currently attending. The selection was not optional and was also visible when the profiles were hidden.
- Creation of a profile with the possibility of providing various optional information (contact details, interests, hobbies, information about yourself, etc.). These could be hidden for non-friends at will.
- schülerVZ offered more options for privacy settings than the other branches of the VZ networks.
- Function to search for other students, also via the interests stored in profiles. However, there was no connection to studiVZ and meinVZ.
- Display of connections (contacts) between members registered in the system. A subdivision between mutual friends and those who attend the same school was also displayed.
- Formation of groups with group discussion forums, of which there were at times over a million. Each member could join up to 125 groups. The topics of the groups were completely free to choose and varied from specific problems to funny statements made just about the name. The profiles of founders of so-called bullying groups have been blocked or deleted according to the operator.
- Create photo albums and upload photos.
- A selection of apps such as B. memory training, spickmich or schülerVZ radio.
- The partner function to connect with his partner, which information was then visible in the community.
- The feedback function was intended to expand the functions in the VZ networks. They could be used to contact other users and participate in or initiate votes. If there were many voices, it was considered whether a new function should be programmed.
Furthermore, the same functions existed as at studiVZ :
- Shudder
- Photo tagging : Individuals on photos could be linked to their user accounts.
- Report : Notify the operator of any rule violations by other users or groups.
- Ignore : Certain people could be put on an ignore list. A subsequent contact or view of the profile was then no longer possible.
- Chat box : You could chat with contacts who were online at the same time as in an instant messenger .
- Bush radio was a Twitter -like service that allowed messages to be sent with a maximum length of 140 characters. These messages were displayed on the home page of all “friends”. The function could be coupled with Twitter so that messages from the bush radio appeared on Twitter and vice versa.
privacy
Almost all data could be released or hidden individually for the internal search function and navigation. Most of the entries were set as non-public by default . Compared to the two offshoots studiVZ and meinVZ, schülerVZ had somewhat stricter measures to protect the privacy of its users. Registration was only possible by invitation from a member. This was to prevent infiltration by parents, teachers and third parties.
The documentation of an automatic evaluation in October 2009 by strangers, who say they are amateur programmers , named some critical security gaps that could be out of date:
- Because the internal search function did not query captchas , large data sets could be collected using simple methods using fast, automated queries.
- Images that were "deleted" were available to anyone who knew them via their local address.
- Data from third parties who might not have access to the network due to a lack of an account could be published internally. The operators did not respond to specific requests for data.
- Some forms can be manipulated using so-called " Cross-Site-Request-Forgery " . Calls to code from other websites trigger a certain action in the network. By widespread integration on highly frequented sites, spam could be smuggled very efficiently into the network.
At the same time, apparently independently, other users collected data sets .
On October 16, 2009, a database with around one million authentic data records was leaked to the weblog netzpolitik.org . As a result of unsettled allegations of extortion with 2.7 million records, a 20-year-old committed suicide two weeks later in the Plötzensee juvenile detention center . The lawyer of the deceased, alleged blackmailer filed a criminal complaint against five employees of schülerVZ. Chat transcripts emerged which, according to the lawyer, show that the young man had been offered hush money. schülerVZ had always denied the allegations. After evaluating the protocols, one employee was suspected of making false, insulting statements and four other employees were suspected of making false suspicions . On February 13, the proceedings against the SchülerVZ employees were discontinued due to a lack of suspicion.
Another data leak occurred on May 4, 2010. A young computer scientist had programmed a crawler that read 1.6 million data records from the online network and wrote them into a database . According to an interview, the business informatics student wanted to show that schülerVZ had not changed anything despite statements in the area of data protection. He also published a video about reading out user data. Like this schülerVZ user data, records have already been leaked to the blog netzpolitik.org several times.
Protection of minors
The content was checked for information from the community. To what extent that was sufficient is controversial. For example, the father of a schoolgirl filed a criminal complaint for the dissemination of pornographic material and for sedition in photos and group offers.
literature
- Jo Bager: Being there is everything. The StudentVZ phenomenon . In: c't . No. 5/2008 . Heise, 2008, Report, p. 92 ff ( c't archive , heise kiosk).
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ - Tagesschau.de - Report on the closure ( Memento from April 12, 2013 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ schülerVZ | Important information: shutdown . Retrieved April 8, 2013.
- ^ Ole Reissmann: Netzwerk-Aus: SchülerVZ closes at the end of April . In: Spiegel online , accessed on April 9, 2013.
- ↑ General Terms and Conditions of the schülerVZ .
- ↑ Introduction. In: Information for parents and teachers. schülerVZ, accessed in 2009 .
- ↑ Lit. Jo Bager: Being there is everything . S. 92 .
- ↑ Lit. Jo Bager: Being there is everything . In: c't . S. 93-94 .
- ↑ tivi meeting
- ↑ chat.orf.at ( Memento from June 29, 2004 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ Big brother is watching you! - SchülerVZ, StudiVZ & co. In: Publication. Bremer ServiceBureau Jugendinformation, accessed in 2009 (information paper).
- ↑ Archived copy ( memento of the original dated February 10, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Holtzbrinck buries VZ-Netzwerk , Spiegel Online on June 11, 2012
- ↑ SchülerVZ offline , SchülerVZ on June 10, 2013
- ↑ VZ.net relaunch , Tech-Aktuell on April 27, 2020
- ↑ http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/schuelervz.net
- ↑ Documentation (PDF; 277 kB) at Netzpolitik.org ; Data leak at Schüler-VZ and SchülerVZ and the data leak , the daily newspaper (October 16 and 19, 2009)
- ↑ SchülerVZ-Daten: The flourishing market for data collection programs - Report from Heise Security on October 19, 2009
- ↑ More than 1 million records extracted from SchülerVZ - notification from Heise Security on October 17, 2009
- ↑ The suicide of the schülerVZ hacker Matthias L. brings the affected company and the judiciary in need of explanation - report by Spiegel Online on November 7, 2009
- ↑ "Hush money" instead of blackmail? , taz November 4, 2009
- ↑ Cooperation or War? - Report from Spiegel Online on November 7, 2009
- ↑ Lawyer reports SchülerVZ employees - Report from Spiegel Online on November 13, 2009
- ↑ Netzpolitik-Interview: Background to the SchülerVZ data leak - Interview on netzpolitik.org from May 4, 2010
- ↑ Data read out from 1.6 million students - article on focus online from May 4, 2010
- ↑ New data leak at SchülerVZ - netzpolitik.org on Tuesday, May 4, 2010
- ↑ 1.6 million data tapped from SchülerVZ , Spiegel.de May 4, 2010
- ↑ Father shows SchülerVZ - message in stern.de from August 10, 2007
