By Lee Durstock

A free lecture featuring C. L. Lindsay III, author of “The College Student’s Guide to the Law,” was hosted by the Student Activities Board on Wednesday night in the Worsham Theater.

Around 100 people showed up to hear Lindsay speak on the subject of getting into trouble online through Facebook and other technological means.

Lindsay is an attorney and founder of the Coalition for Student and Academic Rights. CO-STAR is an organization that provides free legal services to college students and professors across the country.

“All we do is we help college students and college professors for free with their legal problems,” Lindsay said. “We have about 500 attorneys nationwide that provide their help to us and we get about 5,000 requests a year.

“I love doing these (lectures), because it helps keep you guys out of trouble now rather than put the fires out after.”

Using pre-posed pictures of action figures to demonstrate the many ways in which students get themselves into these types of troubles, Lindsay’s lecture mainly focused on how putting pictures of yourself online doing malicious acts can lead to unwanted consequences in real life.

“If you wouldn’t do something offline, don’t do it online,” Lindsay said. “It works with a million different things and examples; the easiest one is email. You know if you were to walk up to someone and say something bad to their face, it’s also a really bad sentiment to put that same thing in an email.”

Lindsay used many real-life comedic pictures that actual UK students had taken of themselves performing acts like bonging beers in their dorm rooms, playing beer pong at parties and passing out in bathrooms on spring break.

“I totally get this,” Lindsay said. “I totally get the urge to drink beer and party and have fun. That said, how many of you guys would print out 10,000 copies of that picture and put them all over campus? Probably none of you.

“When you put a picture up on Facebook, on a blog or anywhere online, you risk putting out an infinite number of copies of that picture and putting them all over the world.”

A lot of real-world horror stories were explained in detail concerning teenagers and young adults who had broken some type of law online and then faced harsh consequences when their offenses were brought to light off the Internet.

Lindsay gave some tips to help students protect themselves including not taking and posting law-breaking pictures, not standing out as a target for sexual predators in profile pictures, watching oneself when taking pictures of anywhere near where one lives, and always keeping account privacy functions on the highest settings.

“It was interesting,” anthropology and art history major Justin Sumner said. “I learned a lot that I didn’t know about with the laws and stuff,  and I knew that Facebook had changed their privacy profile settings, but I didn’t know they were changing them that often because I don’t usually check.”

The organization can be contacted through its website at CO-STAR.org.