University Bans Access To Facebook; Claims It's A Security Issue

from the really? dept

We've seen plenty of stories of silly politicians trying to ban access to social networks in high schools, but in colleges especially things like Facebook are basically the way students communicate with each other. So it's rather surprising to find out (via Michael Geist) that Concordia University has banned access to Facebook on any computer connected to the university network via a wired connection. If you're using WiFi, the university allows it. First of all, that seems like a really strange split. Why should it matter whether the connection is wired or wireless? Even odder is the explanation for this:

The university has decided to implement these restrictions because of concerns that the continuing reliability of the Concordia network could be compromised because of spam, viruses and leaks of confidential information related to Facebook use.

There are spam, viruses and leaks of confidential info all over the internet. So why ban Facebook? And those same issues face wireless users as well as wired users. The whole thing sounds like someone who was very confused overreacted to something in the wrong way.

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