Social Networking Site Guidelines

Details related to social networking

Choose an e-mail address that's safe for social networking

Don’t use an employee or a student e-mail address.

Use an organizational/functional e-mail address.
Use a student organization e-mail address for student sites.

Know your social networking site's rules

Know the terms of service for the site you’re using. Also, understand that by using any site you are implicitly agreeing not to

send or post unauthorized commercial communications (spam)
upload viruses or malicious code
solicit another user’s login information or access her account
bully, intimidate, or harass any user
post content that is hateful, threatening, pornographic, or gratuitously violent
do anything unlawful, misleading, malicious, or discriminatory

Protect confidential information

Beware of the damages to individuals or the University that can result through inappropriate disclosure of personal or confidential information.

Some possible damages:

Defamation lawsuit
Copyright, patent, or trademark infringement claims
Privacy or human rights complaint
Workplace grievance under a collective agreement or unfair labor practice complaint
Criminal charges with respect to obscene or hate materials
Damage to the U's reputation and business interests

Follow the law for student education records

Family Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) is the federal law that protects the privacy of student education records such as grades, transcripts, and student identification numbers.

Defamation lawsuit

See the FERPA tutorial:

http://onestop.umn.edu/staff/ferpa_tutorial/index.html

See the Student Education Records Policy:

http://www.policy.umn.edu/groups/ppd/documents/Policy/ protect_student_records_pol.cfm

Understand the copyright laws that apply to you

If you share images, video, audio, or newspaper or journal articles, you are subject to copyright law.

Conduct a fair use analysis and keep a record of it.
For the copyright’s year range, use the original year of publication through the current year.

See the Board of Regents: Copyright policy, the Copyright Ownership policy, and Copyright in the Age of YouTube from the Digital Media Center for more information.

Summary and introduction : Before you use social networking : Best practices for social networking : Policies related to social networking