New Software For Employers To Monitor Facebook

An anonymous reader writes "The NY Times reports that a new service called Social Sentry has been released to monitor employees' Facebook and Twitter accounts for $2 to $8 per employee. The service also plans to support MySpace, YouTube and LinkedIn by this summer. 'Lewis Maltby, president of the National Workrights Institute, a research and advocacy group, called the automatic monitoring of social networking a "disaster," and predicted that it would lead to people being fired for online griping, the airing of political views and other innocuous conversation. There is a tendency to react to an off-color joke or complaint that appears online more harshly than to the same comment made in a cafeteria or company picnic.'"

Comments

Easy enough to avoid

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Don't use Facebook on company computers
2. Keep your profile private
3. Don't post work related topics on other user's profiles (they may not be private)

Re:Easy enough to avoid

[JLavezzo]

I've never understood the appeal in social networking.

It's the white-listed email system everyone was speculating we'd need when spam got too bad.

Hardly enough.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's hardly enough. Suppose you're an American who holds Democratic views. Your superiors happen to be hardcore Republicans (the fucking crazy kind).

They're monitoring your social media profiles, and see that you've joined Facebook groups supporting health care reform, joined some groups opposing the illegal invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, you've made some comments suggesting you think it's fine for homosexuals to marry and adopt children, and you once twittered a pro-abortion news article link.

Now, they wouldn't have known this about you otherwise. But now they do know. Even if they don't fire you outright, they'll treat you differently, for sure. Maybe they won't trust you. Maybe they won't give you tasks that would allow you to further your career. After all, they probably don't like you any more, just because some political views you expressed differ from theirs.

All that can happen without you using your account at work, without you discussing work-related matters, and even if you keep your profile "private" (which for Facebook these days seems to mean it's open to just about anyone...).

Re:Hardly enough.

[twidarkling]

How's that a strawman? The GGP said "The exact same views." The GP pointed out a view that the founding fathers had, and pointed out how that exact view is no longer universally acceptable. That immediately destroys credibility, since you can't hold *all* the *exact* same views, unless you're down with slavery.

Further, anyone who thinks the constitution is a dead document, never to be altered or changed is a fucking moron, in my books. The founding fathers never could have conceived of the world we live in today, nor of what would become hotly contested issues, and so never addressed it in the document. To hold today's world to a piece of paper that was never meant to address the state of current society is narrow-minded and specious at best.