Facebook security, not a secure idea

You normally log on before class to see who has changed their relationship status or if new photos from the weekend’s party have made their way online. Facebook, a self-proclaimed “social networking tool,” has traditionally served as a way to keep tabs on your friends. But now, some college administrators hope to use it as a method for alerting students to dangerous situations as they arise on campus.

One month ago, the University of Maryland at College Park created an emergency awareness group on Facebook that would allow students to update one another about campus dangers by adding their own information to the Facebook group. What’s more, the university will post all the security updates it sends out via e-mail and phone to the group.

On its face, this might seem like a better way of disseminating crucial information. Perhaps lives could be saved in worst-case scenarios such as a campus shooting if universities updated students through yet another mode of communication. After all, it seems reasonable to assume that some students could be better reached through Facebook than their campus e-mail, which they may not see the value in checking regularly.

However, there are several reasons to think Facebook groups may not be the best manner for increasing student awareness of dangerous campus situations. For one, young people clearly don’t think of Facebook as a forum for serious information. There are mountains of stories about people making a less than graceful transition into the job market thanks to their potential employers’ discoveries of photos they’ve uploaded that showcase their illegal, or at least less than professional, behavior. Mixing safety warnings with the local gossip will only cause students to take the warnings less seriously.

Even more disturbing is the college administrators’ plan to base the group on the idea that students will update one another about developing crises. In catastrophic situations, people’s natural and safe response is to get themselves away from the danger, not to do real-time reporting about where the situation is developing. And because students won’t be updating the group as dangers unfold, the plan won’t be all that different from the traditional warnings.

Creating a group sustained by student input does open the entire campus up to the risk of hoaxes: Anyone would be able to log in and manufacture a security concern and watch from the comfort of his or her bed as classes are cancelled and time wasted as police are called to the campus to investigate the “threat.”
In the end, its casual presentation and open format make security updates via Facebook an idea likely to do more harm than good to campus security.