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"Pre-Crime" Comes To the HR Dept.
storagedude writes "Like something out of the Steven Spielberg movie Minority Report, a startup called Social Intelligence is mining social media to weed out job applicants based on their potential for violence, drug abuse or just plain bad judgment. The startup also combs sites like Facebook and Twitter to monitor current employees, presumably to monitor compliance with company social media policy, but as the criteria are company-defined, anything's possible. Just one more reason to watch what you post, folks."
Unless they provide a full & accurate report as to what information was collected on you(and how it was used), it shouldn't even be happening.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
... but how do these "trawlers" get to see what's on, say, a Facebook page if viewing permission has been given only to a limited set of trusted people? Does Facebook permit trawlers access to such restricted information? Do they use subterfuge to get past the restrictions? How?
My name is shared with a very famous (dead) person so I'm hard to google. But of course he had my email address. From that he found my geocaching account, liked that I made puzzles (he was looking for a game developer) from that found my /. postings, liked what he saw.
Yeah, I got the job and it was fun, but it creeped me out. I hardly ever post anywhere anymore.
Except, of course, for this...
TFA makes a point that invalidates yours though - they specifically mention the fact that if you're tagged in an image your boss is contacted. At that point it doesnt matter if you're rational...every single person in your social network, no matter how extraneous, is having their discretion and rationality tested. Go to a party and have a couple of pictures taken and tagged of you messing around, harmlessly, and forwarded to a boss who perhaps disapproves of heavy drinking/smoking/you kissing guys/stupid pictures of people pretending the Eiffel tower is between their palms...pretty much anything really, and you run the risk of disciplinary action.
At that point the only rational choice is to not participate online at all, or allow pictures to be taken, comments to be made, anything that relates to you. What a sad life that seems.
that sounds like HR in my organization, always cluelessly creating non-working program to solve inexistent problems while totally ignoring the real problems.
Jehovah be praised, Oracle was not selected
No. Don't bother learning. Just hire an "online presence consultant" and let them do it for you. Prices and quality of service will vary based on how much is at stake. In the future, smart students will do real socializing at ball games and keggers while AI-bots make sanitized FaceBook postings on their behalf. Sign up for PersonaBot now. $29.99/mo.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I'm a former military officer - armored cav for much of my career, with stints in intelligence and signal slots and wartime service. I was once asked by an interviewer who was already aware of this from my resume "Have you ever had any life or death decision-making responsibilities?" A little discussion revealed he did not think literal life or death responsibility for the 30+ people in the unit under my command, in wartime, in actual combat, counted. He meant decisions or responsibilities that could have cost significant money, and nothing else. I could easily have answered that one to his satisfaction - signing for training equipment alone when I was the leader of an advance detachment meant there had been times when I was the person responsible for easily more than 100 times the value of his whole company (M1 tanks and Apache helicopters and such add up fast). Instead I walked out of that interview.
I mention this because that person is precisely the person that company will doubtless delegate to go through some potential employee's facebook pages.
Who is John Cabal?
No, it's our own fault for constantly reelecting the same douchebags into office, or voting based on the color of one's skin (see: Duval Patrick, Barack Hussein Obama), or how handsome someone is (William "Bill" Jefferson Clinton), or how "texan" someone is (both Bushes). The truth is there isn't much of anything I like about the last four presidents as they have all seemed to be against growth of the American economy, and pro-offshoring.
And, oddly enough, that "evil" Democrat Bill Clinton's administration probably had the best economic policies out of the last four Presidents' (inclusive of the current one) administrations.
The truth is, we need good sound business management mentalities in the Oval Office and Congress now - people who are truly old-school thinkers who value long-term growth over the quick buck.
We need people with patriotic interests at heart, somewhat like H. Ross Perot and Ron Paul in office, but tempered with better communication and diplomatic skills. We need to vote for the best candidate for every regardless of faith color or creed, and regardless of whether or not the guy is "popular" in a celebrity sense. I don't care whether a candidate looks like Fabio or Steve Buscemi. I care whether or not that candidate recognizes that the making of an excellent leader is someone who is looking to serve rather than to be served.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
They're pro-corporate in that they vote for pro-corporate candidates. They may believe they aren't "pro-corporate", but their actions betray them.
However, it isn't just the right-wingers; the left-wingers are pro-corporate too. With Democrats in power since '07 in Congress and '09 in the White House, we've seen the auto industry get taxpayer money, we've seen the health insurance companies (that do nothing to improve people's health) get a giant giveaway from Obamacare, we've seen more favorable legislation for the copyright mafia, we've seen the banking industry and AIG get a giant bailout for the mortgage meltdown, etc. The left-wing liberals are just as pro-corporate as the right-wingers.
If you worked with the idiot crybabies I worked with in the steelworker's union, you'd hate unions too.
I've never met a group of losers quite like that. The fact that they kept their jobs because of the union is enough to turn me against unions for life. I got singled out in the shop I was in because my starting wage in 1989 was higher than theirs was in 1960. It drove them CRAZY. It's all they ever talked about. Several of them tried to knock me into mills I was running and cause me to get maimed.
I didn't set the fucking wage, the damned union did. Yet they acted like I did something to fuck them over.
Unions need to go. Their time has come and gone. I was 19 at the time. That experience made me decide to go back to college. That's what unions are good for, so you join one and realize you need to do anything you can to not have to work in a union job.
Thank god there are no IT unions. I'd clean bathrooms before I worked in an IT union. Unions are nothing but worker communism put in place so people that suck can't get fired.
Don't kid yourself. It's the size of the regexp AND how you use it that counts.