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"Have you ever shared a secret\u2014something super personal that you don't want anyone to find out about\u2014online? The concept may seem counterintuitive, but it's a popular practice that's been around since the dawn of the internet, and it just keeps getting easier.\n\nBack in 2005, PostSecret (a self-described \"community art project\" where people mail in their secrets on postcards) propelled the interest in sharing private thoughts publicly to new heights. Its completely anonymous environment put contributors at ease, but the advent of social media and apps like Whisper and Secret have signaled a changing of the tide. Now, secret-sharing has more of a face, taking the form of\u00A0popular school-specific Twitter feeds, or platforms that allow you to view posts by people in your phone's contact list. You may not know exactly whose secret you're reading (or who's reading yours), but you do know it's someone in your immediate circle.\n\nBrianna, a 17-year-old from Minnesota, recalls a Facebook page where kids from her high school anonymously posted about their crushes. \"There were people saying, 'This person is hot,' or 'So-and-so looked sexy on Ugly Sweater Day,'\" she says. For her, the page was more of an object of curiosity than anything else. Likewise,18-year-old Alicia, was amused by her school's secret-sharing forum. \"It just seemed like a way for kids to get things off their chests,\" she says. \"At one point, there was a really young male teacher at my school. \u00A0Needless to say, a lot of the confessions were about how cute he was!\" But there were deeper benefits, too. \"It was nice to see students support an anonymous poster who felt depressed.\"\n\nUnfortunately, not all of this very public info comes from the secret-havers themselves. At 16-year-old Lauren's Arizona high school, two students created a Twitter page for sharing secrets about their classmates. \"Everyone started sending in fake gossip, and people were getting so upset,\" she says, noting that most of the secrets concerned who was hooking up with whom. A compliments page was started shortly afterward to counteract the Twitter feed, \"but only popular kids were getting complimented.\" Eventually the creators of the account revealed themselves. \"Both of them turned out to be these well-liked guys who wanted to mess with everyone.\"\n\nEven users who start out sharing more innocuous secrets can find it hard to resist the urge to get personal. In addition to sharing sillier items like one about her crush on Dave Franco, 19-year-old Debbie also aired her grievances about her roommate. \"It was a bit mean,\" she admits. \"I listed everything that bothers me about her, hoping she would see and get the hint.\"\n\nSarah, a college freshman from Michigan, characterized her school's secret page as generally calling out \"people who are obnoxious, loud, or really, really drunk.\" She's shared secrets on the page before: \"It's almost like a diary, but it's more satisfying because other people can read it.\" What about the possibility of being found out? \"That's, like, one of my biggest fears,\" she says. If someone were to accuse her of sharing secrets, she would likely deny it.\n\nIf sharing secrets doesn't personally appeal to you, it's still all too easy to get sucked into the community. Jordan, an 18-year-old from California, found herself the subject of rumors on her school's secret-sharing Facebook page. The items were \"stuff people thought I'd done in the bathroom at school,\" she says. A friend alerted her to the page's existence. \"Once I saw I was being mentioned, I kept checking back. It would have been better for me not to look.\"\n\nWhen officials at Jordan's school learned about the page, they quickly had it removed. But beyond banning pages or accounts, most schools are ill-equipped to handle these situations. \"I think they should have done more to talk to us about it,\" Jordan says. \"Our school didn't say anything\u2014they just shut it down.\" After the Facebook page disappeared, the same information migrated to the app Ask.fm.\n\nThese pages and platforms are akin to the weeds of the internet\u2014they can quickly do damage to the social environment of a school, and they indeed present an enormous administrative challenge, at both the high school and college level. \"At NYU, we don't have an official policy on social media,\" says Assistant Vice President and Dean of Admissions Shawn Abbott. \"Some sites like NYU Secrets are primarily confessionals from students about their daily experiences living in this wild and crazy city\u2014and for the most part, they're harmless musings, and occasionally, hilarious. But when someone posts something hateful about another human being on the internet anonymously, it's tragic and cowardly.\"\n\nIn the event that students are distressed by content on these pages, even schools that want to help them can find their options limited. \"Our admission officers aren't trolling the internet looking to evaluate the online behavior of our applicants or students, and we very much believe and uphold the values associated with free speech,\" says Abbot.\u00A0\"But when something hurtful is brought to our attention, you can bet we're going to investigate and learn more about\u00A0why\u00A0something was posted.\"\n\nIn Jordan's case, after the confessions Facebook page was shut down and students moved to Ask.fm, the trend eventually ran its course. Now, she says, it's mostly used among middle school students and high school freshmen: \"The older kids kind of got over it.\" But the defunct page had a lasting effect. \"It made me disappointed in the kids I go to school with. Why would they would say such mean things about each other and about me? I pretended like I didn't care and ignored it, but it certainly made me view my high school experience differently.\"\n\nHave you shared secrets anonymously, or been the subject of online secret-sharing? Tell us your stories in the comments."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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