Shyzer.com

If you haven’t heard of Facebook.com by now, you’re obviously (A) Not on the Internet more than an hour a day, (B) Not a college student, or (C) Have absolutely no friends and spend all your time brooding and plotting to blow up your campus. If you happen to fall into one of those categories, then I’ll be kind enough to give ya a quick rundown about the site so that you too can seem hip and cool and feel like a young kid again. Started back in late 2004 by a Harvard student, it’s basically a college social networking site that is the ninth most visited website on the Internet, according to Nielsen/Net Ratings. Open only to people with college e-mail addresses, you can create an account, link up with your friend’s accounts, upload and share photos, join groups, and “poke” people in a somewhat sexual manner, among countless other things. I joined back in October of ‘05 and since then it’s added another 4.6 million students and received a $13 million dollar investment by a group of Silicon Valley wizards. Also since October of ‘05, I’ve spent way, way, waaaaaaaaaaaaaay too many hours on it. At one point, I was logging in 10 or 20 times a day to check up on things. I even have my own Goob Fanclub Groub (Ignore the fact that it’s titled “Goob Sucks”)

One day I might tell you about the time I became a Facebook God and had unlimited powers on the site, but that’s not what this post is about (Although I’m sure Fellner can tell you all about how depressed I was when I was suddenly stripped of my newfound powers). No, this post is to share a little story about a group of kids one upping the local police.

Not every college is on Facebook, but all the important and big ones are. On most campuses, statistics place the Facebook saturation rate somewhere between 50-90% and recently, college officials have caught on to this. Since registration only requires a college e-mail address, they too can create accounts and make fake student pages with the real intention of spying on students. There have been a few reports of people being busted for drug and alcohol use thanks to pictures they’ve posted on their Facebook profile. A student at Fisher College in Boston was expelled last year for his online criticism of a campus security officer. Officials at the University of California Santa Barbara, said they would discipline students living on campus who posted information or photographs on their profiles that involved illegal activity like under-age drinking. At North Carolina State, RAs wrote up 15 students seen consuming alcohol in photos on Facebook. The list goes on and on.

And then there are the students at George Washington University who decided to fight back and launch a “Facebook Attack.”

It all started last year when a party was shut down by campus police. Students found it odd that the cops had known about it and then began to realize that the only place they’d heavily talked about it was on Facebook. So, a few months ago, they decided to strike back. They planned another party and talked about it only on Facebook, therefore ensuring that if the cops came this time, the students were being spied upon. They created a group, left tags on each other’s boards, and talked non-stop for weeks about how awesome their “Beer Bash” was going to be.

So imagine the look on the police officer’s faces when they burst through the doors only to find a group of kids standing around eating cake and cookies with the word “Beer” painted on them in icing. Luckily for you, though, you don’t have to imagine. Pictures of the party surfaced on the net soon after and I’ve stuck them in the newly reformatted (although not yet finished) Shyzer Gallery. Have a look here. My absolute favorite is the last one, which contains the stunned look of one of the cops. I just wish I could have been there.

This whole topic raises an interesting issue, though. I used to tell Fellner I couldn’t wait until the Presidential elections of 2024 or beyond. I always thought it was interesting to imagine how sites like Myspace, Livejournal, and the such could come back and bite a politician in the ass. Bush and Kerry and Dean might be a little too old to have run a website while they were growing up, but my generation isn’t. When it comes time for my fellow peers to start running for office, people are going to dig up what they wrote in their blogs, what they posted on message boards, what they said in chat rooms. Everything, and I mean everything, put on the Internet is archived somewhere. Whether it be in Google’s cache or archive.org or a server’s backup in downtown Atlanta, chances are if you want to find an Angelfire site from 1999, you can, especially if you have the resources most powerful news agencies have. We make such a big fuss over what our politicians have maybe said in an interview or possibly said in a speech. Now think about having daily writings from an angst-ridden teenager who went on to clean up his act and run for political office. Imagine the worst thing you’ve ever typed and posted on the Internet. Now imagine seeing that run as a headline in the New York Times or USA Today. I’ve kissed any possible political career away with Shyzer, but that’s fine with me. For other people my age, they might not be ready to write off a certain career choice already and yet they might have already done so without even knowing it.

But Facebook is bringing this scenario to us in the present day, even if it’s only in a smaller scale. Reports are now surfacing that big-time companies and possible employers are getting into Facebook to check out prospective employees. Like I said, all it takes is a college e-mail and any bigwig in a Fortune 500 company surely can call up his alumni rep and get a college address to his old school. Ten minutes later, he’s pulling up Brad Johnson’s profile on Facebook and finding pictures of Johnson’s Johnson on there, right next to another one of him drunk and passed out in his dorm and reading about his “appreciation of the festive greens.” And just like that, there goes Bard’s chances of landing that internship.

On-line privacy debates are nothing new. From the recording industry suing Internet Providers for ISP records, to the Bush Administration’s attack on pornography, to employers being able to read their employees e-mails - It’s all ongoing. But the recent rash of Facebook incidents shine light on the new question involved. Where does the privacy line lie with minors and those releasing their pent up, youthful expressions and indiscretions?

Looks like we’re lumped together with the porn peddlers, the illegal downloaders, and those who are lazy on the job. Good company.

Now I just can’t wait for those 2024 Presidential Debates.