Ben Fitzpatrick, and how this site was built

Who I am

My name is Ben Fitzpatrick. I am a parent at a NSW public school, and I work in digital marketing and technology. In early 2023, an experience at my school led me to start asking questions about its Facebook Page. I have been trying to change the policy ever since.

What I found was not about my school. It was about every NSW school with a public Facebook Page: the same consent framework, the same policy, the same gap between what parents agreed to and what happens to publicly accessible photos in 2026.

I built this site to share the evidence. I do not speak for any school, P&C or parent group. I speak as one parent who looked at the data and decided other parents should see it too.

Ben Fitzpatrick on LinkedIn · fitz.pizza, my personal site

How this site was built

This site was built collaboratively with Claude Code, an AI coding tool made by Anthropic. We produced the research methodology, data analysis, writing and site design together. I directed the investigation, made every editorial decision, and verified every claim. Claude Code let me move faster and further than I could alone.

This is a site about technology and its consequences, and the tools that built it are part of the story.

I am not anti-AI. I am anti-exploitation.

The tools being built right now, including the one that built this site, are transformative. I am all in on what this technology can achieve.

But AI companies and social media companies are not the same thing. Social media companies have spent two decades proving they cannot be trusted with the data people give them. Meta did not ask permission to scrape every Australian's public posts for AI training. It just did it. When asked why Australians do not get an opt-out, Meta's answer was that Australian law does not force one. Clearview AI scraped 50 billion photos from Facebook, was found in breach of the Privacy Act, ordered to delete the data, and the database grew after the order.

The problem documented on this site is not that AI exists. It is that social media companies have made children's photos publicly accessible by default, under consent frameworks that do not mention AI, governed by policies written before any of these risks existed. The technology is not the failure. The governance is.

Principles

• Every claim is sourced. Senate testimony, regulatory findings, published research, company admissions. If I cannot source it, I do not publish it.
• No blame. Schools are following the system as designed. Parents signed forms in good faith. The gap is between the consent framework and the current reality.
• Precision over heat. The facts are alarming enough. Where I am uncertain, I say so. Where data has limitations, I state them.
• I never access children's photos. The research reads metadata, public indexes and policy documents. Where verifying a page required reading its posts, I read the page name, post dates and caption text only. No photo of any child, and no student's personal data, was ever viewed, downloaded or stored. This is a hard rule and a methodological strength.
• Action over despair. Every problem section leads to something a reader can do. The goal is not to frighten people. It is to inform them and give them a path forward.

Funding and independence

This site has no funding. No sponsorship. No advertising. No commercial relationships. The domain, hosting, and tools are paid for personally. I have no financial interest in any outcome. This site is not affiliated with any political party, advocacy group, technology company, or competitor to Facebook. My day job is in digital marketing and technology; no employer or client has any involvement in this work.

If this work is useful, I ask only that you share it. If you want to support it, act at your school. That is worth more than money.

Contact

Email: ben@algorithms.technology

I welcome corrections, additional evidence, and collaboration from researchers, journalists, and policy makers. If I have something wrong, I want to know.

For media enquiries, please email with "Media" in the subject line. I can provide the full dataset, methodology details, and quotes on the record.

Corrections

If any factual claim on this site is incorrect, incomplete, or misleading, please contact me. I will investigate and correct it promptly. I note every correction with the date of change. Getting the facts right is more important than being right.