USG president Alex Lenahan '07 responded last night to reports that Public Safety officers have used facebook.com in their investigations, saying that the practice will only hurt relations between students and the department.
"My opinion is that it's only something that will create animosity between students and Public Safety," Lenahan told the USG Senate last night, adding that he might send a personal letter to Public Safety director Steven Healy explaining his position.
Meanwhile, students across the University have taken steps to prevent Public Safety officers from accessing their online profiles. Email discussion lists and Facebook groups have served as means to alert students that Public Safety officers have admitted to using Facebook to aid in their investigations.
Some messages provide a list of known Public Safety officers registered on the website, while others encourage recipients to make their profiles inaccessible to faculty and staff.
Some Public Safety officers, however, are registered on Facebook as undergraduates, and will thus be able to access students' profiles even if they alter their privacy settings to disallow faculty and staff from accessing their information.
The Daily Princetonian acquired a list of 18 officers with accounts, five of whom list themselves as undergraduates. Facebook representatives did not return a request seeking comment on what action, if any, they would take against individuals who misrepresented themselves on the website.
Last week, the 'Prince' reported two incidents in which Public Safety appeared to have consulted Facebook before approaching students about information posted on the site.
Public Safety Deputy Director Charles Davall admitted that one of these incidents was true but would not comment on the other. He said that Public Safety officers use Facebook to pursue information obtained in other ways.
This admission comes just a month after Davall told a 'Prince' reporter that Public Safety does not use the website to learn of parties or track students' activities because it was like "Big Brother watching you and we really don't operate that way."
One message that circulated among students over the weekend urged recipients to flood officers' inboxes through repeated "poking," an online greeting that, by default, automatically sends an email to notify the recipient that he has "been poked."
"If every Princeton undergraduate were to poke three public safety officers a day that would generate [about] 14,000 emails each day to public safety," the email, which was addressed to "civil disobedients," reads. "They'll never be able to tolerate that kind of inbox clutter."
Despite students' efforts to keep their profiles hidden from Public Safety, computer science professor Ed Felten noted that students ran a risk when they volunteered to post information about themselves online.
"I'm amazed by some of the information students post on Facebook about themselves and their friends," he said in an email. "Facebook is not at all private."
Public Safety officials could not be reached over the weekend for comment.
— Includes reporting by Princetonian Senior Writer Ross Liemer.
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