The article raises questions about the use in art education classrooms of social networking sites like Facebook and image sharing sites like YouTube that rely upon the ability of Big Data to aggregate large amounts of data, including data on students. The article also offers suggestions for the responsible use of these sites. Many youth are using these sites as creative platforms and, taking their lead, the author describes his own use of YouTube as a creative tool in his pre‐service classroom. The author argues that most art educational literature that relies upon Big Data sites consider only the affordances and not the problematics involved, specifically issues of privacy and having youth effectively working as unpaid labour for global corporations.