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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."
Never register there, period.
Ezekiel 23:20
Between cell phone location and call logs, and Facebook, Americans now volunteer for a kind of self-surveillance the former USSR only dreamt of having on its citizens!
I'm happy to live in a country where such practices are illegal.
We all seem very determined to turn our countries into fascist states don't we? This sort of intrusion into people's private lives shouldn't be tolerated, but the public outcry is negligible.
They're allowed to know those things, they're just not allowed to base any decisions or treatment on them.
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.
They ask you to log in to your Facebook account before they even know you. If this happened to me, I would refuse and then politely excuse myself.
Not to worry, citizen, our house counsel is on call during HR's operating hours in order to provide a nebulous-but-entirely-legal justification for any hiring and firing decisions we may wish to make.
I used to use facebook since the early days.
But then I deleted it. My google+, facebook, all gone.
Got sick of the privacy issues, having my personal information being sold for money (while I get NO benefit from it), and now THIS ....
You can tell how powerful someone is by the magnitude of the crime they can commit and be able to get away with.
facebook lets you group friends and assign permissions to those groups as to what they can see. just group the boss and your teachers into a dead end group, set it up in the permissions not to allow them to see anything or the very bare minimum and that's all
Not if they are making those sorts of demands of me. Same goes for any other "activity". If they are demanding i give up my privacy to make them happy, I'm gone.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
It stopped being your private life when you posted it to the Internet.
-- I care not for your foolish signatures.
This (perhaps naive) effort is an attempt to prevent gang agents from infiltrating the department. Local gangs are actively recruiting relatives and acquaintances without criminal histories to work as correctional officers. Many of those job applicants are barely literate and do not realize that their Facebook pages are a give away of their gang connections. They simply give up that information. Apparently, the next step would be full lifestyle checks akin to what fed agencies do. Much more expensive but also effective. Disclaimer: I do work for MD DPSCS.
You should remind them that accessing another user's account is a violation of facebook's terms of service, even if that user gives them permission, which potentially makes it a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (18 U.S.C. 1030), i.e. a felony.
In addition, there are various other questions that employers cannot ask during interviews because doing so violates federal equal employment opportunity legislation, meaning that accessing a user's facebook account opens them up to lawsuits.
There is however one valid legal use for asking users for their facebook accounts, namely screening out employees who'll create a security risk by being especially vulnerable to social engineering. If an employee will have access to sensitive user or employee account information, then you might reasonable ask them for their facebook account password. If they provide it, you politely tell them they have failed the interview, thank them for their time, and send them home early. If they refuse, then you tell them they answered that question correctly and continue with the interview.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
They are allowed *knowing* them. But they are not allowed making hiring-decisions based on them. This puts them in an awkward position if they actively seek access to this information (say by asking).
The purpose of an interview is to figure out if a person should be hired or not. Why ask about something on an interview if the answer is *not* going to have influence on your decision ? The assumption is going to be that they asked because they *did* care about the answer. (that's the most straightforward reason for asking, afterall).
They can claim they where just trying to be social, chit-chat to ease tensions, and that the answer as such didn't matter. But there's any number of *non*-protected topics you can chit-chat about. So why pick a sensitive topic ? That seems at a minimum terribly unprofessional.
That all said, the only sensible answer to such a request is to refuse. Clearly and loudly. "That is completely unreasonable, I am not going to comply with that." A job is important, but it's not worth accepting unlimited bullshit.
Why Making Facebook Private Won't Protect You?
- Because posting something you consider private on facebook (aka publishing it on the Internet) is stupid and careless
- Because facebook employees have unrestricted access to your account
- Because it will be hard if not impossible to *actually* remove your information from their servers and backups
- Because facebook contracts moderating content to outsourcing firms and everything you post there risks being reviewed by an under-vetted, unfulfilled person on a dollar an hour in an internet café in Marrakech.
This is for all you "If you haven't done anything wrong, what do you have to hide?" and "You're one in a million, nobody cares about your insignificant neck-beard life" apologists: Don't you see why it is bad that all that private information is aggregated and under the control of a single entity?
Even if it is done with reasonable safeguards and the best of intentions, which is definitely not the case with facebook, the simple fact that all this information exists online, tied to your real name, means that the potential for abuse is immense. And this is time it's not even facebook doing the abusing and profiteering, it's just an external third party.
And when you've been unemployed for a substantial amount of time and you are desperate for a job, who has more power over you than a potential employer?
Give up your privacy, pledge allegiance to your employer. Don't you love the neofeudalist world we live in?
anti-social?
tell me again, I seem to have forgotton: when was it a requirement that you be 'social' at work?
I've run into so many bastards at various jobs, 'social' is not one word I'd use to describe any of them. but then, they got their jobs done and met the numbers. what else do you want for your paycheck? you want us to be 'friends'? that's not part of the job and never was.
well, he knows C and java and can design hardware. oh, but he's not social enough! lets not hire him.
sigh. if there are jobs like that, I don't want to know about them.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
I know this is /. and everything typically has to be boolean/polar, but how about some more processing before rendering a knee-jerk yes|no and running to the high ground of your position ...
Ask the interviewer "Can you tell me what reason you need to see a personal account of mine such as Facebook?" If you're on track to a high-profile position, support of one or one where security is paramount, they may have a reason. I mean ... I know no politicians or folks in the public sector have done inappropriate things such as maintained inappropriate relationships or done shady business using just such accounts, but hey ... it just might happen someday, right!?!?!? So ... they may have a good reason to ask from their side. Some jobs do require background checks. This could be filed under that. That doesn't mean you have to give it to them. It just means that they have a [potentially valid] justification for it. If it's a wal-mart greeter position, I go report them to corporate and/or file a lawsuit. If it's part of the foreign service officer application process with the state department.
Ask/point out that you are uncomfortable with exposing friends/families information (as well as your own). Again, a security/background check may trump that anyway (if it's a condition of the job). While it's a policy, the human in front of you may actually consider that point.
Ask "How do I know what I show you will be kept confidential?" ... "Is any of this recorded digitally?" ... "May I ask how this factors into your selection process?" ... maybe even without being argumentative.
Maybe even ask them ... "Don't you wish you could forget all the inane* conversations/posts/etc. that you've seen doing this?"
Then ... if you don't get the job, ask "Can you tell me why I didn't get the position". If you feel it was related to one of your (or your friends') inane posts on facebook and/or it's discriminatory (e.g. they didn't hire you because they saw photos of you with blond hair on your facebook timeline and they don't like people who dye their hair) ... go for your lawyer ... or move on to a different job interview.
*Because yes, there is a whole heck of a lot of inane stuff on Facebook.
Que Deus te de em dobro o que me desejas
[May God give you double that which you wish for me]
The only reason this happens is that Facebook is a comparatively new thing, and it takes a while for issues likes these to work their way through the courts. Employers are nuts to ask for the irrelevant personal information that almost any Facebook account contains.
http://management.fortune.cnn.com/2011/03/02/checking-out-job-applicants-on-facebook-better-ask-a-lawyer/
If you wanted to get into social networking in the first place then wasn't the intent to let people see, know and read what your doing? We seem to always hear how there isn't enough privacy on Facebook or MySpace or Google+ but in the end why did you make a networking profile is you want to keep your life private. Once you put data on the Internet it's available for anyone who wants it. Sure you can claim people don't have the right to view it but then why did you put it up in the first place? The bottom line is if you care about the privacy of your actions / data then don't post it online.
The right to work is mis-envisioned. Most people who think they have a right to work don't realize that it translates to a requirement to employ liabilities and lose one's business. The bigger issue, though, is that most people see the having of a job as the only means by which they can subsist, and so they consider it an extension of the right to life.
We are entering an era of such technological ascendency that very few people must actually work in order to provide for the subsistence of the entire population. Capitalistic values do not work well in such an economic landscape. The fact that civilized governments pay landowners to NOT grow food, in an effort to protect a market, while children go to bed hungry within their own borders, demonstrates the absurdities of this disparity.
Of course...people who can't find jobs are not content to just die. They absolutely will turn to crime instead, where they will either:
a) take your wealth from you by stealing it, to your detriment, or
b) receive free food and clothing, paid by your tax dollars, in jail.
We will be providing for their subsistence one way or the other. It would be better, however, if humans could maintain a more enlightened means of solving the distribution problem.
In the United States, employers are barred from asking about certain things during interviews (e.g., marital and familial status). Besides the generic privacy argument, perhaps someone will think of refusing to cooperate because it would expose aspects of the applicant's life that the potential employer may not consider. Perhaps HR teams will get wind of this, as well, and start telling their hiring managers to cease and desist before they end up as first-named-defendant on a lawsuit challenging the practice.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
Back when the internet was young, and I saw that everyone was using pseudos, I thought, "Why shouldn't I use my real name online?" Let's just say I learned why not. I do not use my real name on Facebook, just as I don't on /., or anywhere else. My friends know who I am, just as I know who they are, so pseudos work fine. When an employer, or any other nosy stranger wants to see my Facebook page, they're not going to find it. "I" don't have one. Of course, they will see some slightly embarrassing comments I made in the '90s....
-- sudon't
Air-ride Equipped
I'll allow a perceptive employer to see my Facebook page if they'll let me see the company financial books. That way we can both know there's no funny business going on.
Otherwise we can both agree to trust each other and get some work done.
"Facebook's privacy settings, such as they are, don't hold up in the face of prospective employers who demand to see applicants' profiles."
"My home computer's security settings, protecting the personal diary I keep, don't hold up in the face of prospective employers who demand to see my private writings."
"My front door's lock, behind which I keep lots of private stuff, doesn't hold up in the face of prospective employers who demand that I give them access to my home, follow me around for a while while I lounge and generally do private stuff."
"My pants zipper doesn't hold up in the face of prospective employers who demand that I give them drop trou and display my junk because the guy who wants to hire me is afraid if I sleep with his secretary, she may see that someone else's penis is bigger than his."
Where is the security problem and failure here, really? Is facebook to blame when you give someone else your password?