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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.
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.
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.
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
That might work for 3 weeks or so until FB automatically resets permissions to default-world-viewable and you have to manually fix them again.
Que Deus te de em dobro o que me desejas
[May God give you double that which you wish for me]
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?
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/
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.
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.