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May 23, 2006
This space is your space, this space is my space
I've had just about enough of this Myspace crap. The latest news is that a school district here is telling students that anything they post on Myspace can be used to get them in trouble, such as if they post pictures of them boozing or otherwise misbehaving.
Now I can understand both sides of this debate. Schools don't want their students getting into trouble, as trouble outside of school can spill into school, and lead to that great trump card: the lawsuit. On the other hand, students claim authorities looking at their Myspace pages are invading their privacy.
But I don't get it. Myspace isn't private. I mean, you need absolutely minimal information to find somebody on Myspace. Why, in about ten minutes of searching I found a bunch of people from my high school, I found my cousin's page, and I found Christy's page. I didn't even have to sign in to look at the pages. So, clearly, anything on Myspace is publicly accessible. Anything put onto Myspace is available to anyone with a computer who can decipher teenager gobbledygook.
I mean, even this here Commentary can be read by anyone in the whole wide world. I know this, and as such, I generally try to avoid saying bad things about people I know (especially professors or bosses) because they can and most likely will find out what I wrote. I'm certainly not going to post a picture of me doing something illegal, because somebody's going to find it. If I do someday post a picture of me injecting heroin with Pete Doherty, I don't think I would be in any position to whine about an invasion of my privacy.
If you want to have a Myspace page, don't put evidence of your illegal activities on it! This isn't that hard. It's akin to writing to the newspaper and admitting your guilt. Meanwhile, if schools are going to monitor the Myspace pages of their students, they should only be able to punish students for clearly illegal actions. If schools started punishing people for calling a particular teacher an asshole, that might seem a little inappropriate to me, and can lead to silly lawsuits.
Posted by oz115 at May 23, 2006 05:45 PM
Comments
Are you saying you don't like my MySpace page?
Posted by: christy at May 24, 2006 10:52 PM