Over-exposing on the Internet

Traci A. Logan and Joann McKenna - The Boston Globe: "WOULD KNOWLEDGE about the sexual orientation, partying habits, or political views of your prospective college roommate influence your willingness to cohabitate, before you even had the opportunity to meet? Recent inquiries by parents and students about roommate assignments suggest yes, and it appears a new phenomenon on campuses has trumped the epidemic of illegal file sharing: the willingness to share TMI, or ''too much information," over the Internet.

Websites like Facebook and MySpace -- online communities that connect people through social networks of academic and geographic hubs -- are the latest rage with students. They gravitate toward these sites for a variety of reasons -- yearning for community, access to information, and efficiency in communication, to name a few. We think of them as the cyber equivalent to our generation's cocktail party, absent the boundaries we typically place between each other when meeting face to face.

Let's take a closer look at Facebook. To register as a member, students provide their name, status, school e-mail address and a password, and check a box representing they have read, understood, and agreed to Facebook's terms of use policy. Members voluntarily create personalized profiles. Some offer fairly innocuous data while others seem perfectly comfortable disclosing extremely personal information. It's easy to understand how this happens. In building a profile, the student is presented with forms, making it simple to enter one's address, cellphone number, relationship status, or even whether they're interested in men or women, for example. Anecdotally, students say they feel protected because their online community is closed to outsiders.

Given the massive overload of information presented daily to the millennial generation, should we be surprised they've become cavalier about sharing it? Has the freedom of the Internet robbed them of the capacity to grasp the notion that information has power, value, and consequences? If so, doesn't this also place a premium on their need to understand how it might be used once it leaves their fingertips?

It's important to drill deeper into Facebook's terms of use policy, effective June 28, 2005. The section titled ''Member Content Posted on the Site" -- information students voluntarily post to the site -- is intriguing. It seems that click of the box (the one that states you've read, understood, and agreed to these conditions) and your continued use of the site grants Facebook a remarkably broad license, perhaps even worldwide, to perpetually use and distribute the information and content you provide. This is only a summary; we encourage you to read the entire policy.

Their privacy policy, also effective as of June 28, states they may share member information with others, including, as they put it, ''responsible companies with whom we have a relationship." This seems disturbingly open-ended. No wonder advertisers love social networking applications. Imagine the potential value in gaining access to these consumer profiles from an age group that has become increasingly difficult to reach through lower-tech advertising methods.

In fairness, Facebook makes it easy to find these policies, and members can help protect their privacy by sending an e-mail instructing them not to share their information for marketing purposes. Knowledge of this option presupposes you've read and understood the policy. Yet in our experience, the vast majority of adults, not just students, simply don't take the time to read them, opting instead for that quick click.

Our intent here isn't to bash Facebook, but to offer a reminder that our appetite for exploiting technology is generally greater than our awareness of its unforeseen consequences. We all know the benefit of hindsight is 20/20. We shudder to think how today's students -- tomorrow's political candidates, judges, parents, and teachers -- will react if these legitimized forms of self-expression, captured digitally, come back to haunt them.

The relationship between online behavior and ethical choice is paramount in today's global, technology-dependent society. The same holds true for the link between Web-enabled self expression and old-fashioned judgment. No university administrator wants to believe this new phenomenon of socialization could also become a tool for prejudice or discrimination. Even if they don't realize it now, students don't want lapses in judgment to follow them into adulthood.

At Bentley College, where technology has been a way of life for our students since 1985, we address the consequences of online profiling, data sharing, and privacy in a required undergraduate course. But we need to get this message out earlier: at home, in high schools, and beyond. In the meantime, think twice before you skip over those terms of use and privacy policies, or one day you just might regret offering ''too much information."

Traci A.Logan is vice president of information technology and vice provost for academic affairs at Bentley College. Joann McKenna is Bentley's vice president for enrollment management."