Students are beginning to learn they are not the only people in the Facebook community, as many staff members and administrators are also members of the site, and many have been for over a year.
Freshmen initially learned of staff members being on the site at their summer orientation, during a Housing and Dining presentation by Director of Residence Life Rick Treter. Students are now learning just how public their profiles are with the help of the Student Advocacy Center, which held a forum last week on Facebook privacy settings.
The forum provided a list of some of the officials who have Facebook profiles, including Director of Housing and Dining Julie Weber, North and South side area directors Rosie Perez and Amber Lange, most of the Resident Directors on campus and other AU officials.
Weber first learned of Facebook during the summer of 2005 after hearing various stories from students about the Web site. She said she decided to join the networking site to understand it better and to investigate things students reported to her about it.
Weber said she has very few friends on Facebook, all of whom are students she knows in person. She only checks her profile when she has friend requests, which is not often, but she is on the AU network, so she does have access to many student sites.
However, according to Weber, when it comes to catching students violating rules, Facebook profiles are not very helpful to campus officials.
"You don't know if people put things on there that are truthful or not," Weber said. "We have no way of verifying the accuracy of a picture or anything else on the site."
Each incident must be documented with a specific date, time and names of people involved, Treter said.
"It is just like ATV. ... I can watch a person smoking marijuana, but if there isn't a specific documentation of the time and place, there is nothing we can do," Treter said.
Regardless, both Weber and Treter caution students to either heighten their privacy settings or severely limit the amount of information they reveal.
"I see some things on there that I really think students shouldn't post," Weber said. "It's disturbing."
Treter said the university is not trying to restrict students, judge their behavior or find violations with their conduct, but that does not mean students should not be careful with what they post.
"I ask students to look at their Facebook and decide if that is how they want to present themselves to the world," Treter said.
If a person has a college e-mail address, he can join a school's network on Facebook. While default settings allow anyone in a particular network to access other members's sites, these privacy settings can be changed easily. Users can click "My Privacy" on the left-hand side of their Facebook homepage, which will provide them a list of options, including who is able to search for them and how a user appears to the networks he or she is in.
Fahima Hague, a freshman in the School of Communication, said she has not changed her privacy settings but knows students who have.
"I know someone who changes their photo album settings when they don't want certain people seeing some photos," Hague said.
Users are also able to block people or add them to a "limited profile" list, where a more exclusive amount of information is shared.
Some students say they still have not changed their privacy settings.
Josh Safran, a freshman in the Kogod School of Business, said he was slightly concerned to hear that several staff members are on Facebook, and he plans on adding certain people to a limited profile list.
"Maybe I'll change my privacy settings, probably when I start looking for jobs more seriously," Safran said.
Keysha Martinez, a sophomore in the School of International Service who decided to change her profile so only friends could see it, said she is not too worried about staff being on the site.
"It does sound kind of creepy, but I don't have anything to hide," Martinez said.
