When Lauren Asberry came to college, Facebook changed for her.

“I indulged in Facebook when I got to college,” said Asberry, junior in LAS. “In high school, it’s like ‘You’re cool, you’re on Facebook,’ but in college it’s like you have to be on Facebook or you don’t hear about anything.”

In the time since Facebook began in February 2004, the social network itself has also changed.

Some recent changes have been made to improve the privacy and security settings offered on the network, wrote Max Kelly, Facebook’s head of security, in a blog post.

Despite Facebook’s attempts to adjust its privacy options, technology experts worry that the site’s users do not utilize the settings, leaving personal information available to more than just their friends.

“The number one problem you see with Facebook in itself is not that it’s a terribly insecure application,” said Mike Corn, chief privacy and security officer for CITES. “It’s the cases of people putting way too much personal information on Facebook.”

A classic example of students posting excess personal information occurs when someone creates a group after losing a cell phone, Corn said.

“I see a lot of lost phone groups,” said Katelin Dilger, freshman in Business. “I never join because there’s no point.”

But students who do list their phone numbers on lost phone groups are putting themselves in danger of receiving unwanted calls from telemarketers or stalkers, Corn said. He thinks this danger occurs because students do not realize how accessible information is once it’s written online.

“Once you put it out there, it has a life of its own for a long time,” he said.

Corn said some students come to him when private information has been released or when they are having a problem with a stalker, but at that point, there is little he can do.

“Once the information is out on the public Internet, it’s not under University control,” Corn said.

Students also create their own privacy problems by adding applications to their personal pages, said Roy Campbell, professor of computer science.

“The trouble is when you want to use an application but it doesn’t say what safeguards are in the application about your own information,” Campbell said. “There’s no reason why the application couldn’t collect information and send it to whoever wrote the application.”

Facebook’s privacy page says each application can gather the information that it needs to work once a user authorizes it. The site says users’ contact information is never released through the application’s platform.

The application privacy settings are typical of the rest of Facebook’s privacy options in that they are confusing, said Chris Grier, graduate student in computer science.

“A lot of people don’t know how to get there or how to properly configure (the privacy settings) so they’ll do what they want,” Grier said. “So you end up with people’s privacy being compromised without them even knowing.”

Facebook users Asberry and Dilger also said the site and its privacy settings could be better organized.

“I’ve used them enough, but they’re not necessarily easy to use,” Asberry said.

One problem with Facebook’s privacy is that it is difficult to see exactly what happens when wall settings or search settings are adjusted, Grier said.

“Maybe if they made it more apparent what it looks like, it would help me to know what private information is being handed out and to adjust accordingly,” he said.

The site allows users to see changes made to their personal privacy by entering the name of a friend and viewing their page as it would appear to the friend. However, this does not show how the multitude of other types of people with Facebook accounts – teaching assistants, residence hall assistants, high school teachers, advertising agents, job and internship recruiters – can view a person’s page.

Dana Coldren, an engineering manager for Caterpillar Inc. who came to campus Wednesday and Thursday to recruit students, said his company is considering using Facebook as a recruiting tool.

“We have not (used Facebook for recruiting) yet, but we talked about it,” Coldren said. “The consensus was from student leadership that it was not a good way to go. They did not have a favorable opinion of using Facebook because they thought it was too unprofessional.”

Grier said he is friends with a few job recruiters, but only because he thought he would send the wrong message and indicate he was not interested in their jobs if he did not approve them.

Facebook updated and standardized the structure of its privacy options in March, according to a timeline on the site. After those changes, users can edit privacy options relating to their profiles, news feed and wall, applications and what information appears in searches.

“I don’t know if I utilize their settings more, but it’s more of a restriction of what I put up there,” Grier said. “I keep my profile very minimal.”

Dilger also said she does not make much use of the social network’s privacy controls.

“I’m too lazy to even look at it really, other than when I first set it up,” she said.

Dilger said she takes her own security precautions by being selective about approving random people who request to add her as a friend.

Corn said people can also add to the security of their Facebook accounts by making sure they use a password that is different from all the ones required for campus computing services.

But no matter what experts advise students about in terms of Facebook security, Campbell said the advice may not be taken seriously.

“How can we avoid people using Gmail and Facebook and chats?” Campbell said. “They’re out there, the products are cool and they get work done, but sometimes the security is not as complete as we’d like it to be.”