Date: Thursday, August 2, 2007
Facebook: Just a bit of fun?
You may think social networking websites are just a fun way to communicate with your friends and share information and photographs, but recent events might just prove you wrong.
Oxford University has recently hit the headlines, and not for their academic prowess, but for their use of the social networking site Facebook to track students’ movements following the damage resulting from end of examination celebrations. This move has provoked outrage from students who claim it is a massive breach of their privacy, and cannot believe the university employed people to trawl through every student’s Facebook page. Although you may agree the Oxford dons have taken things too far, it has raised the question as to whether information contained within these sites really is private if anyone can access them.
This is just one of a long line of events in which Facebook has been used to people’s detriment. Take Miss New Jersey, who was blackmailed over indecent photos of herself that she had posted on her Facebook page, and now risks losing her crown. Then there were the Canadian students who wrote some less than flattering comments about their teachers on Facebook that were then discovered, resulting in them being banned from their school trip. An even more devastating result was that of the Pennsylvanian student who was denied her teaching degree when a photo of her entitled ‘drunken pirate’ was found and said to encourage under-age drinking. And there was the case of the DePauw University students who were disciplined following the discovery of pictures of them defacing a statue of a moose on the campus. All this follows the recent survey results which claim that one in five companies now regularly check candidates Facebook pages as a form of vetting them for suitability.
Some may argue that teachers and employers have stepped beyond the boundaries of acceptable monitoring behaviour, and that this is a blatant disregard for people’s private territory that they have no right to enter. However others have retaliated saying that with these modern creations, people in positions of authority should be able to use every avenue available to them in catching the culprits of misdemeanours. Whatever you believe you’d be wise to check the content of your Facebook page before applying for a job, and not to include any incriminating photos that may get you in to trouble with the powers that be!
Source:
Times Online
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