Facebook Used to Investigate Crimes

Given that CollegeRecruiter.com is a leading job board for students searching for internships and recent graduates hunting for entry level jobs and other career opportunities, most of what we focus on when we’re looking at social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace are issues related to careers. But colleges and university students are discovering that the information that they post on-line is not private even if they think that it should be and even if the web site has privacy settings.
A tip of the hat to Charles Cassells for alerting me that Oxford University is investigating what appear to be fairly petty crimes using Facebook. The video of just under three minutes shows a student upset that her school would use photos that she felt would be private and that there would be consequences to her law breaking behavior even though university officials did not witness the crimes first hand. Hopefully she’ll become a little wiser through this experience. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: posting any information on-line anywhere is like getting a tattoo. There’s nothing inherently wrong with it but you have to realize that once you’ve done it, it is permanent and you won’t always be able to control who sees it or how they will react to it.