Maryland Bill Addresses College Athletes' Social Media Privacy A bill introduced Thursday in the Maryland state legislature would stop colleges and universities from keeping digital tabs on student-athletes. The bill would prohibit schools from requiring students to provide information like user names and passwords or to install monitoring software on their computers. It would also prevent schools from requiring students to allow, say, compliance officers or administrators to be their Facebook friends or have their protected tweets followed. "These pieces of legislation are needed because citizens still have an expectation of privacy in the social media age," Ronald Young, a Maryland state senator who is one of the sponsors of the bill, said in a statement. Shawn Tarrant, a state delegate, is the sponsor in the House. The bill is among the first of its kind to address the issue of student privacy, its authors say, and could have significant implications for college athletes. A parallel bill, also introduced this week, would restrict social media access by employers, as well. Although the Maryland bill would apply to all students, its focus is on student-athletes, said Bradley S. Shear, a lawyer based in Bethesda who works in social media and sports law and is an advocate for the bill. "It's very scary," Shear said. Any which way you swing it, it's the same goal for the institution: to get access. It's a constitutional problem. He added, "I believe we still have a clear expectation of privacy." Shear cites the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's policy on student-athletes and social media as one that would be affected by such legislation. According to the policy, each team "must identify at least one coach or administrator who is responsible for having access to and regularly monitoring the content of team members" social networking sites and postings." The policy requires student-athletes to be friends with a coach or administrator on Facebook or to be followed on Twitter, said Steve Kirschner, a spokesman for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's athletics department. N.C.A.A., the governing body for college athletics, has grappled with how to deal with social media and student-athletes. Julie Roe Lach, head of enforcement for the N.C.A.A., created new "desktop investigator" positions for trolling online data, like public search results on Google or social media networks. Current rules have flummoxed some legal experts, be it in dealing with questions around recruitment of student-athletes or monitoring current ones. "We would like to first review the bill to see if it affects our rules," Stacey Osburn, an N.C.A.A. spokeswoman, said. For this reason, it would be premature for us to provide a comment.