We need to start being more careful.

Now that the student legislative elections are over, I think it is time to set the record straight: There is no Nick Halden. I was the one who hung up the “Vote Nick Halden” signs, and I also created his Facebook profile.

Here is a little background. At the beginning of the school year, I decided that I would unfriend a few of my friends on Facebook. I had lost contact with them, and I didn’t really know them that well in the first place. I was surprised. I had so many “friends” on Facebook that I couldn’t even remember how I’d met them, and this made me think.

Had I ever met some of these people? Did they even exist? Had I just accepted their friend requests because I had 100 mutual friends with them or because they said they went to my school? Could they be fake? I had to put this to the test.

I decided to make a fake person. Nick Halden would run for Legislature (if you haven’t watched the TV show White Collar, that’s one of con artist Neal Caffrey’s favorite aliases). I went and counted every single spot in the school where there was a poster on a surface other than a bulletin board (I didn’t want to take up the limited bulletin board space for my fake candidate), and my total tally was 56 spots with candidates’ posters. So I made a bunch of Vote Nick Halden posters. After putting them up and calling it a day, I went home and started the second phase of my experiment.

I went ahead and created Nick Halden’s Facebook profile, put up a generic profile picture of a guy with a fedora covering his face – a photo of Neal Caffrey, actually – and I sent about 600 friend requests to people who had listed BHS as their school. Two days later, Nick had 300 friends.

I love the idea of everyone at this school being connected to one another, and I know that this experiment sounds a little stupid. But I did have a reason for doing this: I wanted to prove a point. Three hundred people granted me access to their personal information: their relationship statuses, their addresses, their email addresses and their phone numbers. Don’t worry; I didn’t look at anyone’s profiles, and I have barely even looked at Nick’s profile since I created it. But think about it: someone could do this exact same thing and mean legitimate harm.

I have no problem with Facebook; I actually use it quite a bit. My point is that we need to be (more) careful with social-networking sites like Facebook. Facebook gives us the ability to accept and ignore friend requests, but so many of us just accept friend requests of people we don’t know because of some claimed connection to our school. Didn’t say where you went to school on your profile? Well, if you’re a member of any BHS-related Facebook groups, it doesn’t matter.

We live in a scary world these days, and while Nick might not be real, his spirit lives on.

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