“OMG! Ur on URated!” Before getting this text from a friend, I had never heard of University Rated and honestly I wouldn’t have minded being completely oblivious to it for the rest of my life.
For those of you who don’t already know, University Rated is a website that rates college women on their hotness. Your picture is displayed next to that of another woman from your school, and the viewer clicks on the person he/she finds to be more attractive. The worrying part is that your consent is not at all needed. Someone just has to get a picture of you (probably from Facebook) and upload it to the site.
I am most definitely not a fan of being “rated” — and I’m not the only one! Rachel ’13 says, “I hate it. I think it’s stupid.”
The main problem I have with University Rated is the concept behind the website. Essentially I was competing with other girls to be called one of the hottest girls at Cornell. A couple of my friends have said something along the lines of, “You should be flattered because just being on there means someone thinks you’re hot!” That’s a nice thought but since the whole submission process is anonymous there’s no way to know the motives behind my picture being posted on the site. That lack of knowledge makes a girl feel really exposed. Like many girls, I worry a lot about my appearance — and having my picture posted on a site for people to see, much less rate for “attractiveness,” is not something I would ever acquiesce to.
To attest to the popularity of this website (I’m not sure why I was seemingly the last person to know about it), within a few hours of getting the text from my friend, my Facebook inbox was bombarded with messages from people notifying me of my presence on the site. “Um, I just wanted you to know that your picture is on this site called University Rated,” read one message from Carolyn* ’13, “I’m sure you wouldn’t have put it up there yourself so I was just warning you about it.” I was glad to know that my friends were looking out for me in real life and on the Internet, since obviously I was a bit daft at everything the Internet had to offer.
It’s never fun to discover that your image has been splashed all over what can be described as the college version of People Magazine. But it’s not tragic. This situation is most upsetting because you feel a loss of control. I knew the risks of posting my picture on Facebook (you know the saying “once it’s on the Internet, it’s never really gone”) but I never expected for anything like this to result from that.
But there is something you can do to get that control back. Make sure to screen whatever goes on your Facebook profile: picture posts, tagged comments, etc. Make sure that any information you have online, you’re comfortable sharing with the world. While I’m sure that doing this wouldn’t have stopped whoever decided to post me on University Rated in the first place, at the very least I can now control what pictures they can choose from. It’s my own personal way of getting some sort of control back.
*Names have been changed
Sources
Carolyn* ‘13
Rachel ‘13