chicagotribune.com: "Lauren Pfeiffer said she doesn't have to worry about what's on her Facebook profile, but she can't say the same about her fellow students.
'Some of my friends could get in trouble with their photos,' said the junior at Andrew High School in Tinley Park. 'I wouldn't want it to be a deciding factor in their future.'"
9 comments:
I am curious what admissions officers would be looking for on a facebook profile site. True, the admissions board is interested in what kind of a person the prospective student is, but photographs and friend's comments only say so much. Perhaps this might be a helpful tool if you are interested in determining how "clean cut" a candidate is aka. no underage drinking, nudity, etc. I just have to ask just how informative a facebook profile can be in this case.
Wow...I cannot believe this! What happened to America's right to privacy? I agree with the admissions officers in the fact that its not right for kids to be posting such inappropriate photos without realizing that somewhere down the line there will be repercussions, although it is an invasion of privacy and an unfair intrusion on the part of the admissions officers.
I know poop that when I was applying to College I cleaned up facebook and myspace so that just in case a college was looking for pictures of my in a drunken stupor, they couldn't find any. I don't blame then. More and more people are applying for college and so any little thing that makes on person better than another, is another person cut.
Honestly, social networking sites are not private spaces. They are there to provide ways of others (hopefully your friends, but not guaranteed) to get in touch with you. Facebook has gone through lengths in order to enable their users to limit who can view their information. It's up to the individual user to make sure that they are being represented to the right people whether it is a school or a total creeper.
This isn't a new topic, but definatly something to be reminded of. I think in general it's not about hiding some of your personal life from colleges but learning to actually keep a personal life. You can have a social network profile but still be a private person. Now a days too many people are putting themselves out their like celebrity wannabes. There's a game to this thing called life, and throwing yourself all to the wind for shits and giggles is throwing away too much for too little too fast.
"We don't have a policy not to look, we just don't look," he said. "Despite the fact that these things are semipublic . . . I don't think we should be spying on things that aren't intended for us."
These sites are not private sites and don't try to pretend they are either. They do have some private features, like if you are going to put up pictures of yourself drinking make the photo's only viewable to your friends.
I think its good that admissions officers check these sites because it helps to let them learn better who the applicants truly are. I'm not only referring to pictures, but also to blogs, comments, and things like that. Also, the profile cannot be seen without consent on facebook and this function may be placed on myspace as well; so... if you don't want them to see, leave it private. It is no invasion of privacy if you agree to let the general public see it.
I firmly believe that collages should not have an official policy regarding online profiles. However everyone should be wary of their profiles. In theatre where jobs are gained by knowing the right people, it's important to always have a good reputation. Besides it's not that hard to create limited profiles or limit what people besides close friends can see. You can get in trouble for bad behavior on campus so why shouldn't inappropriate content on internet be punished too? Like I said it's up to the poster to regulator to restrict access.
On the privacy issues I think it is up to the individual user to make their profile limited, it's not hard, you just have to check a button. With this said, I still don't think admissions people should be looking at the sites because they can't possibly look at every applicants page. (I am honestly surprised that with hundreds of thousand applications the admission offices has time to look at anyones personal site) With your college application there were specific essays, tests, and information everyone universally had to provide. If admissions people start looking randomly at different peoples sites they are getting more/unbalanced information about one student. This information can be positive or negative, it doesn't matter, all that matters is person x whose page they actually looked at got another chance than someone else, unfairly. Lets say person x had drinking photos, so the admissions person ranked them about person v. If the admissions officer took the time to looked at person v's profile, they could have found their pictures of person v smoking a blunt....but they didn't look. All in all it's a bad idea to look at the sites for college admissions.
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