1. Youre updating your profile on facebook.com Is someone looking over your shoulder?

2. A Perfect Friday Night Its the perfect Friday night: the party is popping, half the school is in attendance, and everyone seems to be getting more and more festive as the night goes on and inhibitions fade. Who cares what you do, you figure, since nobodys going to remember this party tomorrow anyway. But then the Facebook pictures go up. With the click of a mouse, probably while you were still sleeping off the night before, a classmate who brought along a camera has made available to the world photographs of you in some very compromising positions. – Seattle University Spectator – 2/1/06

3. What you say could haunt you! In the past few months, college, high school and even middle school students across the USA have been suspended or expelled, thrown off athletic teams, passed over for jobs and even arrested based on their online postings. – USA Today 3/8/06 Students post pictures of themselves holding cans of beer and bottles of liquor even when they're underage. They pose suggestively wearing little sometimes no clothing. Some appear to be smoking marijuana in bongs or joints, even holding firearms. They openly write nasty comments about each other or their teachers and coaches online. – USA Today 3/8/06

4. A FEW EXAMPLES Admissions dean Paul Marthers at Reed College in Portland, Ore., says the school denied admission this year to one applicant in part because his entries on the blogging site LiveJournal included disparaging comments about Reed.LiveJournal Two Louisiana State swimmers were kicked off the team last spring for criticizing their coaches on Facebook. A University of Colorado offensive tackle was suspended from a bowl game in December for sending a racially threatening message through Facebook to a Colorado cross-country runner. An employer who was ready to hire a student from Vermont Technical College in Randolph Center changed his mind after seeing the student's Facebook page, says Lauri Sybel, director of the college career center. Since then, Sybel says she has checked other students' pages to make sure they weren't hurting their job prospects. - USA Today 3/8/06

5. "People are learning how to use the site and what's OK to share," says Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. "As time goes on, people will learn what's appropriate, what's safe for them and learn to share accordingly." – USA Today 3/8/06 Common Sense Applies It may seem like "stealing" to most college students, but drunken photos and racy comments posted on the Facebook are considered public property. So don't be surprised if authorities are snooping around. – Tampa Bay Times 3/3/06 "If you wouldn't put it on a billboard, you shouldn't put it on the Facebook said Parry Aftab, an Internet security expert who runs WiredSafety.org. "I always tell students not to post anything their parents, the police, a college president, a future employer or a predator shouldn't see." – Tampa Bay Times 3/3/06

6. However, William Ferguson, associate director of Public Safety at Ithaca College and member of Facebook, said the department has no inhibitions about using information on the site to collect evidence, identify subjects or to pursue immediate safety concerns. Police at Pennsylvania State University used student pictures from the Web site to punish nearly 50 students after they rushed the football field to celebrate a victory over Ohio State University, according to a Jan. 20 article in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Campus police at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., used the site to locate weekend parties, according to a Jan. 8 article in The New York Times. - The Ithacan 2/9/06 Many colleges and universities make a distinction between looking for violations and using information available to further an on-going investigation.

11. Submitted by Gabrielle E Testerman, University of Connecticut