UDILIGENCE

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U-DILIGENCE
Official Website: http://udiligence.com
Official about page: http://udilligence.com/what-we-find.aspx
Country: Please specify country
Location: Vermont
Founded: 2008
Business: Social Media monitoring, censorship, blocking, reporting of "University Athletes"
Contact
Phone: +1 800-514-5534 ext 5 Toll Free
Fax:


Background

"UDiligence has a monitoring application for Facebook that athletes install on their profiles. The software can locate more than 400 inappropriate words...in status updates and photo and video captions and comments... UDiligence only checks public pages on Twitter, at least for now. For MySpace, schools have to set up their own account and have the athletes OK that page."

" Schools aren’t infringing freedom of speech rights if the athletes consent to be monitored, says Adam Kissel of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education."

"Steve Malchow, an associate athletic director at Iowa State, said the Cyclones talked about using a service such as UDiligence but decided to focus on educating their players, not monitoring them.

We just have felt like muzzling people’s rights to communicate is not proper. What we can do instead is focus on sharing with them what the consequences are if they act inappropriately,” Malchow said." Source: AP


"Bradley Shear, a Washington D.C. Lawyer and digital media expert claims that the practice is an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment. The Kentucky ACLU has publicly condemned the practice. Staff attorney William Sharp said “When students are forced, as a condition of receiving a scholarship, to grant government officials access to all of their social networking accounts and then are subject to punishment for engaging in lawful speech that the university simply doesn’t like, we believe public universities cross the line,”.

Kentucky isn’t the only state where the monitoring of college students’ social media activity is in the spotlight. The California Legislature is currently considering a bill that would make requiring any student to grant access to private social media information illegal." The Courier-Journal


Products

"The UDilligence software uses a standard app to monitor updates on Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and MySpace for any careless posts or comments. By installing the app on their social profiles, the students are in effect agreeing to the UDilligence terms of service, which complies with the terms of service for third party applications on each social network. The software also monitors picture captions to try and figure out if an image violates the institutions social media policy.

When triggered, the software sends an e-mail to coaches immediately informing them that a student has possibly violated the school’s social media policy. Often the status update will be innocent,... it’s probably better to be safe than sorry. Each school puts together their own blacklist with words they believe signify a violation. The Courier-Journal


Countries using products

  • USA

Universities

Louisiana State University (LSU), Ole Miss (Mississippi), Texas Tech, Texas A&M, Texas, Baylor, University of Florida, New Mexico, Missouri and Utah State.

Reports


Tech & Business Partners

People Responsible

Board Members

  • Kevin Long, CEO and founder

Management Team


Investors


Major Shareholders

Other Info

IP & Servers