Is it true colleges look at your facebook/myspace?

[anonymous]

I heard that they hire "special" detectives who can look at your profile -- even if it's PRIVATE -- and that they can look at pictures that are private as well....If it's true, isn't this a bit of a privacy invasion??

So bottom question, my Myspace/Facebook profiles are private AND I changed my last name. Am I safe?

[gotta help u]

IDK......but you got me worried now!!!

[Karen]

you may change your name; but any bad photo's still show your face...Even places of employment now search the web as well.Respect yourself too much to have anything on there you wouldn't want your parents to see.

[CoachT]

Urban legend - partly.

I did some recruiting for a college. I did indeed look at Facebook/MySpace accounts of prospects. I didn't need a "special" detective because most people are really open about their profile.

Even with a "special" detective, they'd need a court order to get past your privacy settings and no prospective student is worth the cost and trouble.

Also, if you have enough sense to privatize your account then you're exactly what the college wants - someone with half a lick of sense that doesn't publicly advertise their indiscretions. ☺

Don't forget the potential for "guilt by association" - if your friends list is public and your friends aren't bright enough to privatize and your friends have unfavorable content - you could be associated with that.

Remember though - if you post a photo online it's available for other people to copy off. They can then post it online too. And their friends, and their friends friends, etc.... some things just don't need to be shared with the whole world.

Mostly though - looking at such things only comes up in special circumstances where you'll be a high profile student (such as the new quarterback). Otherwise, you're an adult, we don't really care what you do in your own time.

Add: yes it's true that employers do the same thing. Police departments look at it too - great place to find out where the under-aged drinking is happening this week.

[AdvancePrep]

We had a post on this topic a few months ago. The short answer is - YES - recruiters (both college admissions and the employment variety) can and will use the Web to learn more about prospective applicants. You can lock things down through various privacy settings, but you have to remember you are using a 3rd party service that you don't ultimately control. The best advice is to be very careful and selective with the information that you post. Whether or not this is invasion or privacy is open to debate. Check the terms of service on the social media sites that you use.

Here's the post from our blog:
You use Google for everything else in your life, but if you are applying to college (or a job, for that matter) - you really should use it on yourself. Thanks to popular social media sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc., you don't need a private eye to snoop into the lives of private citizens. Recruiters in corporate America routinely use social-networking tools to screen prospective employees and a recent study reports that college admissions offices are following this trend as well. In today's information overload society, 'reputation management' is now a standard operating procedure for anyone who wants to advance in the professional world.

As a general rule, it's probably not the best idea to post compromising photos and personal information - anywhere! Can anything truly positive come from chronicling those embarrassing (not to mention ill-advised) teenage party antics? If you don't want your parents to see it, you probably don't want to share it with professional screeners that can make/break your acceptance to your first-choice school. If you are preparing your college application, do yourself a favor and scrub your favorite social sites of anything remotely questionable. You may not be able to control what your friends post on their sites, but at the very least you can make sure only 'G-rated' stuff comes up in a search for your name.

Remember, just because you delete something - does not mean it's gone forever. The almighty oracle that is Google has a long memory. If you want Google to be your pal, keep those youthful indiscretions where they belong - locked away in that impenetrable vault inside your head!