By MARTIN VAN DER WERF
When a sculpture of a deer on DePauw University's campus was vandalized in October 2005, administrators got a tip that they would find the perpetrators by looking at postings on Facebook.
The university eventually identified and disciplined several students for defacing the sculpture. DePauw would probably not have found them without using Facebook, a social-networking Web site, says James L. Lincoln, vice president for student services.
But is Facebook a law-enforcement tool?
Lawyers, professors, student-affairs administrators, and others attending a conference here on higher-education law, sponsored by Stetson University, debated that question and others last week. Participants in the session discussed the uses and misuses of social-networking sites, such as Facebook and MySpace, and related sites, like YouTube, where anyone can post video clips.
Facebook has signed up an estimated 90 percent of all undergraduates at colleges and universities where the site is available. It allows students to share personal information about themselves, but only people they identify as "friends" can get access to their postings.
However, about 30 percent of students admitted in a poll that they had allowed people they had never met to become "friends," said Linda Langford, an associate director of the Higher Education Center for Alcohol and Other Drug Abuse and Violence Prevention, in Newton, Mass. The center is financed by and does research for the U.S. Department of Education.
Some colleges increasingly wonder if they should monitor Facebook and MySpace for signs of illegal behavior by their students.
Last summer several colleges were embarrassed when photographs of their athletes apparently being hazed appeared on online photo-sharing services. The incidents led to the suspension of some teams, and to worries that colleges might be held legally liable if someone were injured in a hazing incident that college officials might have learned about online.
And more recently a series of racially offensive student parties on or near campuses across the country have drawn exceptional attention in part because the events — which featured "gangsta" and "ghetto" themes — were recorded on social-networking Web sites.
But panelists at the conference warned that colleges on the lookout for lawbreaking or just crude and insensitive behavior could be setting themselves up for a new line of litigation.
Conflicting Laws
Fred H. Cate, a professor of law at Indiana University at Bloomington and director of the Indiana University Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research, said he knew that security officers at his institution passed the time looking at Facebook profiles. But not everyone necessarily shares that approach.
"My guess is that the admissions department or the athletics department is on Facebook every day, and they may be acting, based on what they see," Mr. Cate said. "They might tell an athlete to remove a posting, or something like that."
The problem, he said, is that if one department of the university is actively monitoring postings, and taking action as a result of what it finds, while another department is not taking any action based on what it sees, the university could be accused in a lawsuit of having a double standard — or worse, of willfully ignoring illegal activity.
If illegal activity involves a child, "we are obligated to report it," said Mr. Cate. But can a university open an investigation every time a photograph appears to depict people younger than 18 drinking alcohol or doing something else that is illegal?
"The law is not going to be much of a guide in this area — there are lots of conflicting laws, and very little privacy protection," said Mr. Cate. "It's a nightmare for universities."
For those reasons and others, speakers at the conference advised university officials that it would be unwise to attempt to monitor the social-networking sites. It would be impossible anyway, said Steven J. McDonald, general counsel at the Rhode Island School of Design, given that Facebook has an estimated 7.5 million users and MySpace has nearly 100 million. In addition, he said, there are at least 200 other smaller sites similar to Facebook and MySpace.
"This is a very interesting window into student life," he said. But universities do not need to monitor it, he argued. Courts have held that the students themselves are responsible for information and images that they post, even if they are using campus computer networks when they do so. Even though information that was once considered private is openly shared, colleges should avoid the temptation to snoop, he said.
"This may surprise you, but students were engaging in sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll long before Facebook, and will long after Facebook is not of interest to anyone," Mr. McDonald said.
Many college officials have adopted the approach that they will not look at postings on Facebook and other sites unless they are contacted by a student's parent or someone else concerned about a specific posting on one of the sites, said Ms. Langford. That is the standard adopted by DePauw, said Mr. Lincoln.
But Mr. Cate said he worried that colleges were being inconsistent in how they viewed and reacted to the sites. Are colleges now writing policies about how the sites should be used? "I think people are just getting started," he said.
http://chronicle.com Section: Money & Management Volume 53, Issue 26, Page A28