Universities Track Athletes Online, Raising Legal Concerns Jamie Squire/Getty Images Louisville Coach Rick Pitino, left, bars his players from using Twitter during the season. The business plan of Varsity Monitor is simple. Major universities like North Carolina, Nebraska and Oklahoma pay $7,000 to $10,000 a year and Varsity Monitor keeps an online eye on their athletes. Gerry Broome/Associated Press A message on Twitter from former North Carolina football player Marvin Austin in 2010 revealed that he was receiving impermissible benefits and was a factor in his being suspended for the season. Among the services the company and others like it provide is a computer application that searches social media sites that athletes frequent, looking for obscenities, offensive commentary or words like "free," which could indicate that a player has accepted a gift in violation of N.C.A.A. rules. "Every school, we work to customize their keyword list," said Sam Carnahan, the chief executive of Varsity Monitor, which has offices in Seattle and New York and also provides educational programs to universities. We look for things that could damage the school's brand and anything related to their eligibility. Yet what may look to some like a business opportunity, and to universities and their athletic departments like due diligence, appears to others to be an invasion of privacy. "I think it's violating the Constitution to have someone give up their password or user name," said Ronald N. Young, a Maryland state senator who has sponsored a bill that would make it harder for universities to monitor their athletes online. It's like reading their mail or listening to their phone calls. The debate on college campuses mirrors the larger conversation throughout the country over how much access to personal online activities private individuals can be compelled to give to employers. University administrators face a tricky situation when it comes to their players" activity on social media, balancing issues of privacy while trying to guard against the possibility that an errant posting on Twitter or Facebook could result in trouble for an athlete or the athletic department. On March 12, North Carolina's football program received a one-year bowl ban and lost 15 scholarships after an N.C.A.A. investigation that was prompted by a Twitter message sent by a player. In the N.C.A.A."s statement about North Carolina's punishment, it hinted that institutions should be tracking public information made available by student-athletes if there is a "reasonable suspicion of rules violations." That has caused an increase in business for Varsity Monitor and companies like UDiligence and Centrix Social. Some colleges require athletes to give them access to their Facebook or Twitter accounts, either by downloading software to monitor them or simply requiring that they let a coach, an administrator or a third-party company "friend" them on Facebook or follow them on Twitter. "There's this big gray area that we're all going into right now," said Bill Voth, the co-founder of Spiracle Media, a company that advises colleges about social media. Schools like North Carolina need to protect themselves. But I can see the legal side with privacy issues. The men's basketball teams participating in this weekend's Final Four in New Orleans - Ohio State, Kentucky, Louisville and Kansas - represent the many ways that athletic departments are handling the newest forms of mass communication. Kentucky Coach John Calipari has more than a million Twitter followers, while Louisville Coach Rick Pitino bars his players from using Twitter during the season. Ohio State's star player, Jared Sullinger, stopped sending Twitter messages in January to eliminate distractions. With colleges worried about a situation similar to North Carolina's occurring on their campuses, lingering questions remain: Where should the line be drawn? Can colleges monitor athletes without being invasive? And is it legal for a university to require that a student make his private information available? Carnahan says his company tailors its service to whatever the university requests, allowing it to determine to what extent social media activities are monitored. But some college officials are uncomfortable with the notion of monitoring their athletes on social media, be it public or private content. "If the university is going to screen all students or all prospective students or everyone that's applied, we'll engage in that with the university," Notre Dame's athletic director, Jack Swarbrick, said. I can't foresee a time where they would. Bradley S. Shear, a lawyer based in Maryland who works in sports law and social media, supports the bill Young introduced in Maryland. He said that a key difference in monitoring a student's online activities, as opposed to an issue like drug testing, was that the content being searched for was inappropriate as opposed to illegal. "The Supreme Court has ruled over and over again that students do not leave their constitutional rights at the schoolhouse gate," Shear said. He said that any policy that required students to give access to "password-protected electronic content" was "a clear violation of their student's First and Fourth Amendment Constitutional rights." He added of companies that monitor athletes" online activities: "These companies are selling snake oil that contains a major legal liability time bomb. To me, there's no difference in having to Facebook-friend a coach than turning over user name and password.