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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
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.
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 have any facebook. If an employer required me to get one, it would have company email and nothing personal at all. And time spent on it would be fully billable.
"Be grateful for what you have. You may never know when you may lose it."
Yes. Part of the interview process at my last job (internet marketing startup) was to check prospects' scores on online tools that measured "engagement" in blogging, Twitter, Facebook, foursquare, Google+, YouTube, etc. The company would also send out emails "requesting" that employees post/Tweet/Like events, books, blog posts, awards, or webinars related to the company, made by friends of/investors in the company, and so on. If you didn't have social media "juice," they weren't interested.
Even for tech support positions they weighed social media marketing knowledge alongside tech knowledge, because you had to defend (or upsell) the product on support calls. It's to the point now where they changed the job title of the phone support position to "Entry-level *ub*potter," presumably because they weren't getting people with marketing knowledge.
They'd ask us to mob people they wanted as guests on their weekly marketing show. I don't know what they expect when they do that; it struck me as annoying.
They're also extremely aggressive about responding to negative or skeptical posts and comments, to the point where they'll join MetaFilter to post a sales-pitch response to a question.
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
Other than Facebook itself, and Google, has anyone actually been asked to join a Social Network by their employer?
My employer - a university department - decided it needed to have a social networking presence. Since I'm the main web guy, that basically amounted to "we want you to join Facebook and Twitter".
We use it these tools to disseminate news about our department and to try to keep more frequent contact with our alumni. But that's as far as it goes - as far as I know, they couldn't care less about my personal activities on there (and my personal Facebook profile is actually separate from I use for work; but don't tell Facebook that! And I don't use Twitter personally). I've made it a point to not "friend" my boss nor most of the faculty who've asked. My (infrequent) personal posts are all set to "friends only"; and I do my bet not to say anything that could come back to bite me.
Of course it helps that I'm a really boring person.
#DeleteChrome