Assistant Professor Craig LaMay is giving a talk about the risks of social networking right now at Fisk 211. It’s being hosted by SPJ and about 20 people showed up.
Facebook owns your information and can sell it to anyone, LaMay said, according to its terms of service. (It loses the license when you remove your information, though.) He says we live in an awkward time. The First Amendment makes a distinction between private and public speech. “The Internet obliterates the private-public distinction.”
LaMay: Students have gotten into a lot of trouble because of Facebook.
- Loyola University: Athletes, get rid of any social-networking page you have, or lose your scholarships.
- Princeton used Facebook to identify students who stole a bench, and then expelled them.
Facebook doesn’t have any legal risk for what you put on the site, LaMay said. You take all of the risk. In the same way, RSS aggregators like Google Reader don’t have any liability for libel when they link to news stories; The New York Times is the one that has to pay for it.
College students aren’t crazier than students of the past, LaMay said. “You just had the misfortune that you live in an age where you can distribute it globally…. You live in an age where so many things just get captured.” The accuracy of Facebook makes it delicious to marketers – “It’s the best database they can buy.”
Ways Facebook can use its information: Just a combination of gender, ZIP code and date of birth creates unique matches for most of the U.S. population. Pictures can be used in facial-matching technology. So think of everything you put on Facebook as a permanent tattoo, LaMay said.
Q&A:
- So even if we did remove all our information, it’s still out there? Absolutely. It’s all cached on Google.