May 26
By Amir Sezavar Keshavarz
Legal and ethical considerations account for a major concerns in dealing with social networking systems. For SOTON Student Connect, we have identified a number of such concerns as follows:
- Third Party Content and Content Ownership: It has been decided that the responsibilities of the content would be with the students who uploads them and thus the University nor the system would not be liable for the uploaded content.
- Defamation: Users are able to report problems and dubious materials to the site administrator who will take the appropriate action.
- Employment Practice: It refers to the tendency in employers to check the applicants’ social networking profiles before recruiting her. This concern will not apply to our system as only university students with valid university email accounts are able to access the site. This itself assures student’s privacy to some extent.
- Privacy and Trust: The student is always in control of their data and can decide upon who can see their information.
The legal and ethical considerations are an important topic and for the first phase of our project for this course, we have addressed the following concerns to some extent.