Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Companies That Force Employees To Join Social Networks?
First time accepted submitter rubeon writes "Companies can get a lot of mileage out of social networking services from the likes of Google or Facebook. Chat, document collaboration, and video conferencing using services like Google+ Hangouts or Facebook's Skype are seductive additions to an IT arsenal. But a lot of people have privacy concerns about these services, and there's no shortage of horror stories how these sites track and exploit their users' habits. Would you work for a company that forced its employees to join a social network?"
Create a @ Work account, simple This also means you can easily avoid problems such as this: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16338040
Other than Facebook itself, and Google, has anyone actually been asked to join a Social Network by their employer?
(No, Gmail does not count).
I've heard of people being asked to follow twitter, but that's hardly a social network, and its far from bidirectional.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
If I were looking for work, I'd take the job, and just add the bare minimum of details to the site. Get a bit of political clout with the supervisors, then conveniently forget to log in for a week, or a month, or "oh dear, I forgot my password, and I don't know what email account I used to sign up".
Having been unemployed recently, I'd much prefer a paycheck to a bit of already-compromised privacy.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Why would I have any problem working for a company that forced me to join a social network? I wouldn't join with the same profile that I used personally. I would keep my business activities with the site strictly segregated from my personal persona (if any). But if the cost of losing your privacy as an employee to a google or a Facebook accrues almost entirely to your employer, not to you.
Maybe they can make it a condition of your job to join, but can they really make you use it? Just telling them that you don't post much because you're not that kind of guy or gal would be a hard argument for them to refute.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I think you're the one who's asleep. Skype is owned by Microsoft.
Disclaimer: I work for Jive Software, one of the leading vendors (if not the leading vendor) of Social Business Software, so take it for what you will. I'm just a hosting engineer though - not a marketer.
That said, I think this question actually entails two separate issues. The first one is, will having their employees collaborate socially save them time, money, and energy? I've seen many, many examples of companies coming to depend on social software - there are plenty of examples on Jive's site (and it's not just blowing smoke, I've seen firsthand evidence of this and have even talked to some people on the sales floor who swear by it). Some customers I work with have grown so dependent on social software that they cannot tolerate even a minute of downtime. Social business is, in many ways, the wave of the future, and to criticize companies for trying to get on the bandwagon and realize the benefits for themselves is not something I'm prepared to do.
The other question is: Should the company provide a sandboxed environment for this kind of collaboration, or should they force their employees to use solutions that potentially violate their privacy or have other issues? I'm not going to say that any of the solutions out there such as Facebook have those issues necessarily, but they are obviously very much less sandboxed and do not have the interests of corporate and personal privacy in mind near as much as a vendor whose software can be sandboxed to provide some safety for personal information and company secrets.
At Jive we eat our own dogwood, and we use a social instance of our own software in the company, and I can't imagine working without it. But if a company were to force me to collaborate on publicly available sites where my grandmother (for example) would also post, I'd seriously wonder what they were smoking.
For linux tips: http://www.linuxtipsblog.com
Why any company would trust sensitive internal information to Google is beyond me.
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.
I'm fairly young and I already start getting reactions along the line of "Are you a criminal or what?" when I tell people I don't have a facebook profile. Also, I'm pretty sure the police would be watching people without public social network presence for they are hiding something for sure. Fortunately for me, they're probably too lazy to get up from facebook.
I don't use social networks, so don't know a lot of their details. But one complaint that I commonly hear is that people can tag photos of you, and even if you don't have an account, Facebook will link this information together to create a hidden profile of you.
If your employer requires you to use your real name and information when signing up for an external social network, and your friends who use that same social network post pictures and other information about your personal life, is it possible that the network will associate this information with your work account, which will then bring it into your bosses radar?
If it is a private company network, then no problem. But if it is a public social network, it seems like it could create the same sort of problems that occur when bosses force you to friend them with your personal social network account.
While you are technically correct, you are ignoring economic realities and pressures. Sometimes just because you *can* quit doesn't mean that you will be able to find another job. There are places in the country where if you lose your job, you will have to move.
For linux tips: http://www.linuxtipsblog.com
Sign up with a new account and compartmentalize your activities appropriately.
Unless a network enforces one account per individual.
With different emails, profiles, behaviors, etc how would they notice? Likes, interests, posts etc should be completely segregated between professional and personal. Maybe use different names as well, for example the formal Michael on the business account and the familiar Mike on the personal account. They can't really tell from IP. Maybe Michael is a father's account and Mike is a son's - again, avoid personal info like birthday's etc on the business account. A business account at a particular company has no need to contain birthdays, schools, etc.
Facebook uses skype for Video chatting. So you have your regular skype and Facebook's skype.
I cannot say strongly enough how horrifically bad this advice is.
If you make a habit of going to HR when they ask you to do something that is even tangentially related to your job duties and essentially demand a payoff, if you last years it's pretty much a miracle. Hallelujah.
For linux tips: http://www.linuxtipsblog.com
With different emails, profiles, behaviors, etc how would they notice?
For one thing, correlations between people tagged in the same photo.
avoid personal info like birthday's etc on the business account.
As I understand it, all major social networks operating in the United States collect date of birth to be COPPA compliant.