Universities spending thousands of dolloars and hours tracking online activity of athletes

[tornado]

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/31/sports/universities-track-athletes-online-raising-legal-concerns.html?pagewanted=1&utm_campaign=Feed:%20nyt/rss/Sports%20%28NYT%20&utm_medium=feed&%2362&_r=2&seid=auto&smid=tw-nytimessports&utm_source=feedburner&%2359;%20Sports%29

Interesting story -- entire new businesses have cropped up ("Varsity Monitor") who track the online activity of scholarship athletes, and charge schools up to $10,000 just to see if...
"that athletes are active on (social media sites), looking for obscenities,
offensive commentary or words like ???free,??? which could indicate that a player
has accepted a gift in violation of N.C.A.A. rules. .."

The schools even require the students to give access and passwords to any site the school may want access for - violating some Constitutional rights...

[Beninator]

So what is to prevent a student athlete from opening a fake account with an assumed name? Simply give the school the regular account with their name and then proceed to start with the alias account in which they could control things better. IMHO, it is terrible to have to do that, but it is a way around the system.

[abesimpson]

I was at an IBM conference a few years ago, and one topic in the key note address mentioned how there would be a big market for businesses doing this kind of thing.

Not tracking athletes on social media sites in particular, but mining unstructured data. Blog posts, twitter and Facebook updates, e-mails, text messages, ect will dwarf the amount of structured, stored electronic data (transactions, invoices, box scores, encyclopedias, phone books, ect) in terms of storage size by an order of magnitude in the tens of thousands (or something ridiculously large) over the next decade. Being able to look through all those unstructured and unordered pieces of text and find something meaningful is a hot research topic in computer science right now. This gets into the research that IBM did for their Jeopardy-playing robot. Pretty cool stuff. But it is also starts bringing up privacy and big-brother issues.