<p>Marian,
Several years ago, much to his chagrin, my son also found out on Facebook,that his roomate-to-be drank heavily and smoked pot regularly. It created a lot of anxiety for him, and unfortunately, he was not able to switch roomates. The roomate questionaire for incoming students addressed issues such as neatness, sleep habits, and smoking but not underage alcohol and illicit drug use. I presume there are legal issues involved in asking those questions even though they have major impact on sharing a room with another person. He was blithely told that students are assigned roomates based on their "interests" and that part of college life was learning to live with someone who may be very different than they are. Sounds great in theory. My son became quite anxious before starting college knowing that he would be rooming with someone who had habits that he did not personally partake, and which would create moral/legal dilemmas for him. Sure enough, he wrestled with whether to tolerate the underage drinking and drug abuse or report it to the resident advisor, as he did not want these activities in his dorm room, especially when his roomate refused to desist. It is difficult to negotiate around an addiction. For whatever its worth, he also attends a top-20 university. I agree that his roomate at the time probably gave little thought about future employers or grad school when he listed his favorite activities on Facebook-it seemed "cool" to him.</p>
<p>"What I did not realize is that kids at top schools are foolish enough to announce it in public, in a setting in which they go by their real names."</p>
<p>Marian-- The vast majority of college kids drink. And they know they drink. And their friends know they drink. And they all know each other's real names. I'm not sure what you think is so "foolish" that it needs to be so hidden online when it is prevalent in person.</p>
<p>Lindz, the kid in question is in HIGH SCHOOL. She will be a freshman next year.</p>
<p>Personally I agree that if this is indeed what she is advertising on Facebook, asking for a roommate switch is a good idea. No need to "tattle" to the school, just that the kids met online and it is clear that they will not be a good match.</p>
<p>My kids, like most, have their profiles set up so that only their "friends" can see them. DS is an incoming college frosh, he joined his college class's network. Everyone in the network can see his name, what networks he's in, his default picture, and who is friends are. Beyond that, they have to "friend" him to see the whole profile. He has about a dozen "friends" from the college network who he's never met in person, but I think it's a nice way to at least be familiar with a few people before he heads off to college. Especially since he's the ONLY kid from our HS at this college, and it's 5 hours away.</p>
<p>Lafalum84, in my (limited) experience with Facebook, most kids have NOT restricted their profile to friends-only. This might be different on different networks, but on the three I belong to, the overwhelming majority of profiles are open to anyone on the network.
Also, joining any facebook network requires only that you have the use, even temporarily, of an email address in that domain -- I imagine anyone determined to break in could do so quite easily.
So ... yes, Facebook is a public forum. Anyone with access to your facebook page can copy, paste, forward and distribute anything on the page to anyone.
I'm puzzled by kids who post text and photos indicating alcohol and drug use (bongs are popular props), as well as details of their sex lives -- often naming names. Facebook is probably an accurate reflection of their world, and perhaps the kids don't care who knows it, or maybe they're just naive and unaware.</p>
<p>I keep emphasizing to my kids the Facebook and MySpace are public. I don't think they get it and i totally agree that some of what some kids are putting on Facebook will come back to bite them big time.</p>
<p>I registered with an email address on Facebook but did not add my kids as "friends." As a result, i can only see their default pic, what networks they're in, and their friends list. On the friends list, names in black cannot be accessed (except for default photo, friend list and networks) unless you are listed as that person's friend. Names in blue can be seen by anyone with a facebook registration. 95% of my kids friends have their names in black, meaning they have their privacy settings turned on. I can view less than a half dozen profiles out of nearly 200 between my two kids.</p>
<p>i just changed mine to only friends. thanks moms. i had some stuff that i might not want adcoms to see. i have a job right now too</p>
<p>I have my facebook set so that only my friends can see my profile. However, I don't trust that feature. It may stop working/not work. Also, if someone really wants to see your information, he/she can easily override the settings. All one needs to do is talk to one of your friends. As a result, my facebook is clean (not that there's anything to hide anyway).</p>
<p>Many colleges do warn against this now. It is common knowledge (at least among the colleges with heavy industry recruitment) to make your profile private and to not friend anyone who you don't know. Plus keep you profile private, only your friends, and to purge most of the incriminating photos once you hit junior year.</p>
<p>I presented myself as a drinker before I got to college because I wanted to make friends with the same kind of people as me, people who like to drink and go to parties. It worked. Now I delete almost any photo I have of me drinking or embarrassing myself (usually due to drinking) because I'm starting to interview for internships and eventually in a few years grad school/a job.</p>
<p>A FRESHMAN has no need to worry about that kind of stuff as long as they remember to fix their profile before losing opportunities to it.</p>
<p>
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A FRESHMAN has no need to worry about that kind of stuff as long as they remember to fix their profile before losing opportunities to it.
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</p>
<p>I was under the impression that anything posted on the Internet in any form should be assumed to be immortal. You can try to kill it, but it won't necessarily stay dead. For example, a search engine can easily pick up something that was posted several years ago.</p>
<p>Is Facebook an exception to this rule?</p>
<p>There is an internet archive that the public can access, but I would be surprised if it had every iteration of a Facebook page, which sometimes change hourly.</p>
<p>Well I would say facebook is a site that uses servers that are not accessible by the general internet community. When you change you profile it changes the material on that server permanently. So no, when I search my name on google in 5 years it won't say I like "boozing it up, making drinking games, drinking on the job, lying to my boss, skipping work" or any other stupid thing I decided to put up freshman year in college. Correct me if I'm wrong.</p>
<p>The worst I can imagine happening is someone taking a screencap and sending it to an employer, but I don't know anyone who has ever been my friend and would do a stupid thing like that, so I think I'm cool.</p>
<p>You are wrong. Google caches in its servers. You can delete and rewrite, but if your name comes up on a search, so may the deleted information. It is usually in blue, stated as "cache" after the corrected citation at the end of the item googled.</p>
<p>Not all things appear on a search, or it may be number 100 which someone may not read.</p>
<p>Facebook accounts can't come up on a google search because they require access to one of your networks in order to get your information. Although I have nothing wrong on my Facebook, In have tried googling myself to see if my facebook profile would come up and none of the hits are from facebook. Even if someone can get access to any network if they really wanted to, they can't see your profile just by googling you.</p>
<p>Note: I saw all of the results for my name too, because my name is pretty uncommon and there were very few results.</p>
<p>Stupid is as stupid does.....and kids that post stuff like that are not the sharpest tacks. Everyone has access, employers have rescinded offers after seeing facebook pages showing inappropriate behavior. </p>
<p>As far as student interaction, I hate facebook because it is substituted for what used to take personal interaction to get to know someone. Instead it does the obvious....stereotyping tool from both ends. It makes people rush judgment before they have even met a person.....declaring the person is too wild for me or too geeky or too ugly or too whatever.....it also is so fake when it comes to "friends".</p>
<p>To me personally, I would rather have a roommate that drank than a roommate that kicked me out (sexiled) me every weekend (which is what I had in college). Maybe this illustrates why potluck roommates are not the best choices.....</p>
<p>Back to my point. Facebooking people is the norm now. Not even emailing someone and exchanging dialogue....just reading what someone posts about themselves as getting to know them.</p>
<p>
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What goes through the minds of kids who announce to the world "I break the law on a regular basis"?
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</p>
<p>Being one of several million people who make unverifiable claims to have possibly broken laws that are not all that strictly enforced, is not especially dangerous. It's not like blogging about bank robbery and street-corner cocaine dealing.</p>
<p>Some people take "screenshots" of Facebook pages they have access to and post them on their blogs or e-mail them to others. "Screenshots" actually capture the image you see on your computer window. There was a case last year of a Cornell student blogger who kept the Facebook screenshot of a student who died while visiting a friend at other college on Spring Break. The cause of death was alcohol poisoning. The Facebook page itself was taken down on Facebook's own site, but the blogger kept the page on his personal website for all to see (the deceased talked very candidly about binge drinking, etc.) The blogger wrote about how Cornell's administration urged him to remove it out of respect for the family, but he refused. </p>
<p>See this page for more discussion about Internet confidentiality.
<a href="http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=354297%5B/url%5D">http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=354297</a></p>
<p>Your daughter's friend should ask for a reassignment of a roommate and leave it at that. If she is pushed for a reason, then and only then, should she offer the info she gathered online.</p>
<p>brooklynmom, I'm pretty sure that's exactly what she will do if she decides to seek the reassignment at all. She is a tactful young woman.</p>
<p>siserune, I realize that we're talking about a law that a large number of people break. Most people probably don't take this particular law very seriously -- but there are a few who do, and it's hard to predict just whom they may be. Providing publicly available evidence of your own wrongdoing just seems stupid to me.</p>
<p>Could you explain to me why it's such a big deal that someone is announcing they drink on Facebook? I mean, I am in agreement that it's stupid to post that kind of information on facebook. But you keep bringing up the law as if a police officer is going to find out a 19 year old drank from facebook and will put him away for the rest of his life. Believe it or not, it's a pretty common thing, whether someone posts it on facebook or not. It's really NOT that big of a deal.</p>
<p>Again, I agree that it's a generally bad idea, especially considering future employers will try and look at that kind of thing. But then I also wonder, by the time someone is out of college will that even be relevant?</p>
<p>And just because the roommate drinks that makes her incompatible with your daughter? I just think the difference between drinking and not drinking isn't this huge personality rift. It's unfortunate that you are prejudging someone like that. . .seems like a very sheltered perspective to me.</p>
<p>Actually, neobez, my daughter has nothing to do with this. It's a friend of hers who checked out her prospective roommate on Facebook and discovered that the girl's profile heavily emphasizes the message "I drink and party."</p>
<p>I think we agree more than we disagree, neobez. We both think that it's stupid to post that information on Facebook. Maybe it's not a big deal, though. One of the reasons I started this thread is to see whether others think it's a big deal. I have learned from some of the posts here, including yours, that it may not be as big a deal as I thought.</p>