Jamie France | Leave Facebook be

We all deny that we ever had an account with MySpace. Let's face it: it's embarrassing. But the truth is, MySpace was a cool way to keep in touch with friends who live across the globe, to post photos and to make connections with people you might not have met otherwise.

That is, until MySpace took a turn for the worse. Until stories of stalkers and sexual assaults linked to the Web site became prominent in the news. Until it became commonplace to receive messages from teenage bands, asking you to preview their music in the hopes that you will like it and you will be their friend and you will join them for milkshakes. True story.

Luckily, Facebook came to the rescue.

It was supposed to be safer. When it was first launched, you needed to have a college e-mail address to register and your personal page could only be accessed by those you accept as friends and others on your campus. Students felt secure enough to post scandalous pictures and divulge biographical information without the threat of consequence.

But lately it seems that this sense of privacy is misleading. In an interview with The New York Times, Mark Smith, assistant vice chancellor and director of the career center at Washington University, stated, "I think students have the view that Facebook is their space and that the adult world doesn't know about it, but the adult world is starting to come in."

While stalking activity may be restricted to advocates of the Facebook News Feed, a new danger exists: Many businesses are using Facebook to research job applicants. According to The New York Times, over 30 companies have admitted to looking at sites such as Facebook and MySpace to check the backgrounds of potential employees and interns.

Though these businesses don't have direct access to student pages, employees who recently graduated often retain their Facebook accounts for the purpose of profile browsing. Patricia Rose, director of career services at Penn, states that she has spoken to employers who admitted to using Facebook. "Employers have young alumni on their staff and it's easy for them to establish alumni accounts on Facebook and gain access. What you have out there on the Web may come back to haunt you."

There is evidence that the number of companies using Facebook is increasing.

On June 11, 2006, The New York Times assured us that Ernst & Young, one of the world's leading professional services organizations, was not using the Internet for background checks.

However, on Jan. 10, 2007, the College Journal from The Wall Street Journal announced that Ernst & Young has decided to "reach us in our natural habitat" and use Facebook in the recruitment process.

Even college administrators have been known to police Facebook, looking for mention of illegal behavior or inappropriate comments made by students.

One particular occurrence at Johns Hopkins University demonstrates the degree of absurdity this practice has reached.

Last November, junior Justin Park was suspended for an entire year for creating an "offensive" Halloween party invitation on Facebook. According to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, the university wanted to supplement his punishment with 300 hours of community service, a ludicrous reading/writing assignment and a workshop on diversity and race relations.

The use of Facebook for these purposes has spun out of control. MySpace was understandably blacklisted when its lack of security became a national issue, but Facebook was supposed to be our safe haven.

With the constant expansion of the Internet, it is unbelievable to me that we, as hard-working students, cannot use a social-networking Web site without fear of it coming back to bite us in the expletive. What we do in our personal lives should be kept separate from what we do in our professional lives. One has little bearing on the other. There's a reason why we choose to omit certain things about ourselves from college applications and job interviews: they're irrelevant.

If administrators and employers have access to our friends' Facebook profiles as well, they can track text we post on their walls. We should not have to be cautious in speaking to our friends for fear of it affecting our careers. It's too easy for inside jokes to be misconstrued by outside readers, not to mention the restrictions put on our inherent right to freedom of speech.

With the downfall of MySpace and the slow demise of Facebook, what means of online expression are we left with? Milkshakes with my new indie friends - who are ironically from Pennsylvania - isn't sounding so bad after all.

Jamie France is a College freshman from Plantation, Fla. Her e-mail address is france@dailypennsylvanian.com. Le Petite Freshman appears on Wednesdays.

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