The controversy started with a story in the Daily Princetonian revealing that Public Safety had used Facebook in two investigations. In one case, a student's friend posted a photo of the student that was taken during a party in the student's room. The photo reportedly showed the student hosting a dorm-room party where alcohol was served, which is a violation of campus rules. In another case, there was a group of students who liked to climb up the sides of buildings on campus. They had set up a building-climbers' group on Facebook, and Public Safety reportedly used the group to identify the groupÂ’s members, so as to have Serious Discussions with them.
Students were outraged over the alleged violation of their privacy. As the post author notes, this is apeculiarr reaction, because anybody with a Princeton email address (which includes the security staff) can get a facebook account and look at anything other Princeton facebook page (you have to "friend" people from other schools to see their profile, but your schoolmates are fair game regardless of whether they are friends or not). Given that, it's difficult to argue that a student really has a fair expectation of privacy regarding anything he or she posts onto the site.
Still, Facebook feels more private than it is. Most people, I feel, think of it as a virtual place to hang out and casually swap stories with friends. They don't think of it as effectively in the public domain. This image/reality gap is troublesome.
In any event, a warning to all facebook users. You may be being watched. Act accordingly.
2 comments:
A math professor at a Midwestern college blogged about his reaction to reading his students' Facebook entries. If his experience is typical, then it's clear that most students don't think about the fact that people other than their friends will read what they've written.
There's no way that what you post on facebook can be considered private. However, there's a huge debate going on in higher education right now as to the correct usage of looking at facebook pages for investigation purposes and job hiring purposes. So it seems that the area is very grey.
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