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Why Making Facebook Private Won't Protect You
itwbennett writes "Facebook's privacy settings, such as they are, don't hold up in the face of prospective employers who demand to see applicants' profiles. In an MSNBC report, Bob Sullivan found that 'in Maryland, job seekers applying to the state's Department of Corrections have been asked during interviews to log into their accounts and let an interviewer watch while the potential employee clicks through wall posts, friends, photos and anything else that might be found behind the privacy wall. ... Meanwhile, on the other side of the barbed wire fence, coaches and administrators are forcing student athletes to 'friend' them in order to monitor their activity of social sites."
I'm happy to live in a country where such practices are illegal.
Better solution if you do use Facebook: laugh at the people demanding to see what you're up to and walk away.
Here's the secret to immortality:
It shouldn't be hard to allow users to add a distress password that would make Facebook appear logged in but would hide anything that would not be visible to outsiders.
If it's a checkbox requirement, that won't help. "Don't have an account." "Right. Refused to log into Facebook. And now Google+, please."
I'm not usually one for regulation, but this seems like an easy one. Employers must not require employees, contractors or applicants to interact with the company through any social networking service with their personal accounts. Employers must not require employees, contractors or applicants to utilize any social networking service with their personal accounts. Employers may require employees to interact with the company and use a company-provided account on a social networking service as part of their regular job. This could easily fit into a fair employment act.
(I look forward to holes being poked in my prospective law.)
Of course, that does assume the ability to walk away from a job opportunity without excessive repercussions...
Therein lies the problem, of course. My first reaction on seeing this was "Right, I'm not taking that job... I'm not even finishing the interview." Then I thought back to a few periods in my life where my ability to live without outside support had been put into serious question by lack of employment; and realized that while I may say that now, there have been times and may be times again where I needed the job. It's easy to be choosey from the relative comfort of a pretty good paying job. I have enough savings now that I'd be fine for several months at least in the event of job loss, so I don't see me being that desperate any time soon. But let's face it. Life's sometimes a bitch. Anything could happen.
That said, I've held a security clearance, and known people with even higher security ratings; and even the Feds don't go demanding to see your Facebook profile. This shit is ridiculous.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
How about maintain two FB profiles, one for friends and one 'work safe' one with work colleagues on it.
Better solution - Maintain a fake 2nd page covered in information about how much you support various federally protected classes to which you may (or may not) actually belong.
Then watch them squirm when they try to come up with any plausible reason to give the job to the boss' young white Christian nephew rather than to a reasonably qualified older gay Muslim African-American (whether in the "Samuel Jackson" or the "Dave Matthews" sense of the term).
Asking for access to personal material opens a whole can of legal issues that most employers don't want, and it surprises me any would actively seek to subject themselves to such accusations. Hell, my own current employer actually has a policy banning managers from searching the intarwebs for job applicants, just to avoid these issues.
This. A million times this. The fact that employers get away with this and the Feds can't really shows that there is something seriously wrong. Coporations can invade us day and night blatantly, but if you're a federal agency you might need to jump through some hoops first. Since when are corporations allowed to go above the law?
Considering that the interview was for work in a prison, perhaps there's another reason?
If I were hiring people to be peace officers, and asked them to show me their Facebook profile during an interview, I would not hire anybody who accepted and let me look at the profile. If they don't understand that it's wrong to search without probable cause to suspect wrongdoing, then I don't want them in that job.
Then again, the fact that I think like that would probably disqualify me from being in a position where I'm making that kind of hiring decision....
> and even the Feds don't go demanding to see your Facebook profile.
That's probably because they don't need your permission in order to look at your profile. My understanding is that background checks by the FBI include a review of your online profiles - they just do it through a back channel that isn't public.
I recently interviewed a sysadmin who had no privacy settings on his facebook page. I found this a little troubling because I find innate privacy concerns to be a key attribute of a good sysadmin. When I asked him about this he commented on how routine follow up background checks as part of his current position (which was for a branch of the government) had made those privacy settings a farce to him. They can see the data anyway, so the only person he was fooling was himself.