If Ruckus scams nearly half a million people, should the University continue to support it? That’s the question facing the administration after Ruckus used Facebook in a subversive tactic to get those schools to adopt Ruckus. In doing so, Ruckus was completely unethical, and the University should end its partnership with Ruckus as soon as possible.

On Sept. 5 of this year, a man named Brody Ruckus at Georgia Tech started a Facebook group entitled “If 100,000 people join this group, my girlfriend will have a threesome.” It took only one day for 1,000 people to join the group, and the initial goal of 100,000 members was reached in three days. Brody Ruckus promised pictures if the group reached 300,000 members, and once that number was exceeded, pledged to post a video of the threesome if the group became the largest on Facebook. The group reached 400,000 people before it, along with its creator, was deleted. It was deleted because “Brody Ruckus” was not a real person, but an agent of the music-downloading site Ruckus, which is currently used by many University students.

Ruckus data mined the e-mail addresses of the members of the groups, and sent e-mails to students whose schools did not currently have Ruckus, erroneously claiming that his or her school had in fact signed up with Ruckus, and he or she could download music for free if they activated his or her Ruckus account. Since this was not true, these schools did not have the infrastructure in place to deal with the increased traffic on their server, and internet at those schools became even worse than internet has been here.

Brian Rust, the senior administrative program specialist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, one of the schools affected, told eSchool News that 1,100 UW students signed up for and were using Ruckus within 24 hours of those e-mails being sent out. Then, Ruckus e-mailed those students who had signed up and urged them to e-mail UW officials to get UW to partner with Ruckus. Simply put, Ruckus tried to strong-arm UW and other schools by trying to get the schools to sign a contract with Ruckus after essentially stopping internet access at these schools, and the University should take a stand and cease its support for such a shady company as soon as it is possible.

Yes, Ruckus has been a boon to campus life. But what Ruckus did was totally unacceptable. Ruckus lied to students at UW. How do we students at the University know that Ruckus hasn’t been lying to us? For all we know, Ruckus could have sold our e-mail addresses to a third-party marketer, or is planning to in the future. That’s the problem with dealing with a company that has been as unethical as Ruckus has: even if they haven’t done anything bad here at the University, it’s hard to trust them anymore.

Furthermore, Ruckus is replaceable. In April of 2005, the University held a fair to help select a music downloading service, of which Ruckus was one of many participants. For example, Napster, Rhapsody and Cdigix are all used at other colleges, and there are websites such as eMusic that provide music downloading as well. The University should start looking into these services, as well as the other options they looked at in the April 2005 digital expo, and pick something to replace Ruckus after the University’s contract runs out.

Ethical concerns about Taco Bell led to its expulsion from campus, and Ruckus’ actions were just as unethical, if not more so, than those of Taco Bell, as well as more pertinent to students. The University should take a stand and say that any company that does not respect students’ privacy will not be tolerated by the University.

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