While doing research for my paper, I came across this story on the Student Press Law Center's website. In this incident, a 16-year-old girl filed a lawsuit against the cheerleading coach after the coach printed out private information from the girl's Facebook profile and distributed it to teachers and other students. The student, Mandi Jackson, said the coach required the girls to give the coach their passwords to their accounts. While some students immediately deleted their profiles, Jackson did not, and the coach then read and printed out private messages Jackson and another student conducted on the site. Because of the private material in her account, Jackson was not allowed to participate in cheerleading activities. Jackson said she would have been fine with the coach viewing her public profile, but the coach crossed the line in collecting passwords and reading and then distributing the private information.
I have to agree with the student on this issue. It's one thing to check students' public profiles, since they're public. If the students are unwise enough to have inappropriate material on public profiles that would reflect badly on themselves or their teams/schools, they should be punished. I think what makes the coach's actions even worse is that she distributed the private information to others - if the students didn't give her permission to do that and the school has no policy in place about this, she shouldn't have done it.
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