Great point Julie! Those TOS agreements are not written in stone as legal precedent yet,and I have been following the case and I bet that there will be a split verdict and it may well go to the Supreme Court. The President at the time of the case may impact this decision because several members are real old and ready to bail. I think companies that use TOS agreements generally have made it very one sided and in a legal contractual dispute the judge generally rules against the drafter of the contract because they executed the document and they knew what they intended to do when they wrote up the document, but TOS's are used by many companies to act punitively with little explanation or due process. Besides, my classroom groups are closed and are disbanded after the course is done unless the group were to decide to carry on! I was merely talking about research of the type that we are discussing. I will admit that Facebook's appeals system does work but they had to be outed by the Scobie case to get their system better. Chris -----Original Message----- From: air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org [mailto:air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of Julie Cohen Sent: Thursday, August 21, 2008 12:22 PM To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org Subject: Re: [Air-L] question about use of Facebook in classroom Fyi the legal force of the TOS is about to be tested in the Lori Drew prosecution (the Megan Meier suicide case) under the U.S. Computer Fraud and Abuse Act - one element that needs to be proved is "unauthorized access" and the prosecution's theory is that violation of the TOS made the access to Facebook's system unauthorized. Julie -----Original Message----- From: air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org [mailto:air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of Terrell Russell Sent: Thursday, August 21, 2008 12:06 PM To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org Subject: Re: [Air-L] question about use of Facebook in classroom Heidelberg, Chris wrote:
My big question is why don't you have students create pseudo accounts to protect their identities. I use Facebook as a communications tool as well as content distribution tool.
Chris
Large unanswered social issues aside, I'd be wary of requiring/compelling students to knowingly break the Terms of Service of any company. Creating an account with fake information, pooled passwords, or a group account is directly addressed in the TOS at Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/terms.php _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/