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Picture Your Name Here - The New York Times

EDUCATIONLIFE

TECH SUPPORT

Picture Your Name Here

By LISA GUERNSEY

JULY 27, 2008

SUNDAY afternoon used to mean lazing on the quad or sleeping off a hangover. No
one could remember much about what happened the night before.
Now theres a new ritual: reviewing Saturday nights escapades. By nap time,
party photographs are already posted on Facebook.com. Not surprisingly, they may
reveal a little too much. Even more mortifying, theyve likely been tagged the
individuals featured in the photos identified. The captioned images can be easily
discovered by anyone on the photographers friends list, by friends of those tagged
and even by entire city networks, depending on the users privacy settings.
Matt Jackson, a junior at the University of Washington, remembers waking up
to half a dozen tagged photos the day after a party. Wed all been drinking a little
bit, he says. Well, not just a little bit.
Whats a student on the job market to do? De-tag. Now.
De-tagging removing your name from a Facebook photo has become an
image-saving step in the college party cycle. The event happens, pictures are up
within 12 hours, and within another 12 hours people are de-tagging, says Chris
Pund, a senior at Radford University in Virginia.
Campaigns to educate students about the pitfalls of Facebook how professors,
parents and prospective employers can use the social networking site to uncover
information once considered private have become a staple of freshman
orientation sessions and career center clinics. Students are apparently listening.

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Picture Your Name Here - The New York Times

If Im holding something I shouldnt be holding, Ill untag, says Robyn Backer,

a junior at Virginia Wesleyan College. She recalls how her high school principal saw
online photos of partying students and suspended the athletes who were holding
beer bottles but not those with red plastic cups. And if Im making a particularly
ugly face, Ill untag myself. Anything really embarrassing, Ill untag.
When it emerged in 2004, Facebook was open only to collegians at a handful of
institutions. Today, it is available to anyone with a verifiable e-mail address and has
80 million active users. Default settings let any user view pictures, and tagged
photos become part of your profile, open to your friends list and chosen network.
Facebook has been hammered over privacy issues, and responded in March with
new tools. Now settings are easier to reconfigure, and access can be customized to
subsets of friends - school friends, work friends, beach-party friends - keeping others
away from photos.
Still, students have Facebook friends they dont know very well; even using
restraint, friends lists grow large. As Ms. Backer reports, I have no more than 200
friends on Facebook. Im kind of picky.
Despite the privacy concerns, Facebook hasnt reined in its tagging application.
According to comScore, Facebook has the No. 1 photo service on the Web thanks
in part to the tagging feature, says Chris Kelly, Facebooks chief privacy officer.
Students say it is easy to use and a convenient way to exchange and track pictures
from friends. The tradeoff is you cant pre-empt anyone from tagging your image.
And because many Facebook users log in a dozen times a day, you have to act fast to
disassociate yourself from a photo.
Jaclyn Mautone, a senior at Fairfield University in Connecticut, realized how
embarrassing tags could be as she flipped through photos from spring break: Im
like, Oh, thank God thats not me. Everyone is in bathing suits, but they havent had
a chance to untag the photos yet. Ms. Mautone advises against adding beach-party
acquaintances to friends lists. Maybe they are not even your friends, and they
suddenly have this power to tag you.
Jim Saksa, a senior at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote in the student
newspaper recently about how in the main library one day he noticed a girl looking

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Picture Your Name Here - The New York Times

at pictures of him. He didnt know her, but she apparently had access to a friends
photo album. The experience, he says, brought home the idea that his image was out
there, out of his control.
Our generation is the first to cope with the necessary assumption that our every
action seen by another may in turn be seen by all of our peers, he wrote.
Part of the privacy gap comes from the ubiquity of digital cameras. Todays
students whip out tiny cameras or photo-capable cellphones at any occasion. While
people are taking photos, they will say, Oh, youre going to see this on Facebook!
says Mr. Jackson of the University of Washington. Asking someone to remove a
photo is just not part of Facebook culture.
While students say they see more caution in whats being posted, seniors
especially are tightening privacy controls. Early data from a study by Educause
shows that 45 percent of students who use social-networking sites put a lot of
restrictions on who can see their profile; 41 percent put some. Others are
concerned enough to deactivate their accounts altogether.
Joel Carle, an education graduate student at the State University of New York,
Fredonia, did so when he started hunting for teaching jobs, just to be safe.
Ms. Mautone has limited her photo album to friends only. She de-tags often.
And she is using Facebooks new privacy tool that lets her exclude a specific friend or
group of friends from seeing photos she is tagged in like the supervisor from her
internship who friended her but is many years her senior. In short, her strategy is
vigilance. Stay on top of it, she says, and make sure you know who can see what.
Lisa Guersney is the author of Into the Minds of Babes: How Screen Time Affects
Children From Birth to Age 5.
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