According to a recent article that appeared in the Harvard Crimson, athletic programs across the country have taken on a new task: monitoring the electronic behavior of their students. As many programs suffer under the weight of increased media attention, watching over Twitter and Facebook accounts has taken on a special importance.

Harvard’s head men’s basketball coach Tommy Amaker recently announced that he had assigned his assistant coaches to monitor what players on the team are saying on their personal Twitter accounts. “Just like we like to monitor their whereabouts, monitor their academics, we need to monitor their Twitter accounts as well,” Amaker said to The Crimson.

The women’s soccer coach at Harvard, Ray Leone, enforces a total ban on Facebook during each season though he claims the reason is to allow team members to focus and not to avoid bad publicity.

Harvard Assistant Athletic Director Kurt K. Svoboda says he does not approve of policies like Amaker’s: “I don’t believe in monitoring what our student athletes are saying,” he says.

The practice isn’t limited to Ivy League institutions, for the last few seasons basketball teams from places as diverse as St. John’s and Missouri have banned Twitter use by their players.

Last June, the NCAA criticized University of North Carolina officials for inadequately monitoring student athletes’ activity on social networks. That ruling had important implications for all college athletic departments. Across the country, athletic departments have been forced to decide between potentially being cited for “failure to monitor” and upsetting privacy rights groups for monitoring or banning social media use by their players.

A whole cottage industry has cropped up devoted to electronically monitoring players. Kevin Long is the CEO and creator of UDiligence, a service that monitors Facebook and Twitter posts made by college athletes. Once a department signs up for Long’s service, athletes are told to install an app on their Facebook and Twitter accounts. A computer program then begins filtering through the players’ past and current posts and tweets, searching for over 400 keywords such as “stripper” and “shotgun.” When even a photo caption or comment contains one of the keywords, it is added to a list of alerts that is sent daily to the athlete and periodically to the school’s athletic department.

Big-name institutions such as the University of Texas at Austin, Louisiana State University, and the University of Florida have reportedly signed up for the service, which launched in 2007. Long said that three Ivy League schools have contacted him about the service, though none have officially signed up yet.

These days, business is booming for UDiligence. “As more and more incidents [occur] where athlete posts things that end up in the media, it certainly has increased the interest in making sure athletes are responsible about what they are posting,” Long said.

Privacy rights advocates are less than thrilled to hear that business is booming. Many have raised concerns that monitoring services such as UDiligence may chill students’ speech. Moreover, some have raised doubts about the ultimately value of such a service. Once something has already been posted on a social network, it is impossible to completely retract, as somebody else may already have taken a picture or saved a copy of the offensive text or photo. It’s impossible, after all, to unring a bell.

(Lee Davis is a Chattanooga attorney who can be reached at lee@davis-hoss.com or at 266-0605.)