Although it is not directly related to a civil or criminal case, this story is interesting for the tangential issues that arise from it.

In December 2008 an individual named Brad J. Ward who was until recently the Electronic Communication Coordinator in the Office of Admission of Butler University (he is now “Chief Explosion Officer (CEO)” at BlueFuego) received an email from a colleague at another college.

The email concerned a group on Facebook that had been formed for the graduating class of 2013 at the colleague’s school. It was timely because the colleague’s college had just sent out their admission packs to the prospective new students.

The colleague pointed out that 18 of the 23 members of the group did not attend the university in question, nor did the university have any other application information on these individuals. Ward looked into a similar Facebook group for his own university and found that the same people had started groups there. He continued digging and found that the same individuals had started or were admins on groups for universities all over the United States. Originally the fear was that some kind of domain squatting was happening, but as they dug they found that it was much bigger than what was originally thought.

He appealed for help on his blog Squared Peg citing some of the possible uses of obtaining the personal information of all of these students. According to the story two companies, one called College Prowler and a second company called Match U were behind the unauthorized college groups but these were facts that were turned up through an investigation by Ward and his peers, not because College Prowler or Match U disclosed anything on the groups initially.

Eventually College Prowler apologized and agreed to end their affiliation with Match U and the 2013 groups. At the time of writing Match U still appears to be involved with the groups.

This story is interesting from many different reasons including use of personal information to potential violations of intellectual property rights. However, what I find the most interesting is how this investigation was carried out.

Essentially it was a distributed network of professionals who were able to analyze and provide information on the 250+ groups that were discovered. This isn’t the first time that the blogsphere has investigated something, people remember Rathergate. However, this is the first example I’ve heard of where the bloggers used collaboration tools such as Google docs to effectively share the information they discovered. A video about that collaboration is provided on the SquaredPeg blog, but you can also review the video here.

I first heard this story on CBC’s Spark podcast. Host Nora Young interviewed Ward on the story.