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Internet Privacy

Entry 1380, on 2012-04-23 at 20:27:53 (Rating 4, Computers)

A series of incidents have recently caused some controversy in the US. They involved the legality (and/or morality) of potential employers requiring people being interviewed for jobs to give up their Facebook passwords so that they could be "checked up on" for things the company might not like, such as drug or alcohol abuse in the past, controversial political views, and other things which don't necessarily have direct relevance to the job in question.

On one occasion the person really needed the job so he gave the interviewer his password and on another the person refused (I don't know whether either got the job or not after that). Since then Facebook has said they don't condone this sort of behaviour and will try to stop it. The issue has even gone as far as the US senate and is being investigated as a breach of privacy laws. The senator involved sees it as an "unreasonable invasion of privacy for people seeking work." That's undoubtedly true.

But on the other hand, what's the problem really? If the person applying for the job finds the interview techniques of a company that draconian they probably wouldn't want to work there anyway. And is it really a breach of privacy because the person has the choice on whether they give up the password or not. And doesn't the company have the right to know what sort of person they are hiring?

Actually I'm not totally serious about the comments above but I have worked out a strategy which I would use in a similar situation. The trick is to create a fake profile which contains material potential employers would like and would generally be totally false. For example you could be applying for a job at an oil company and say you admire the company's values where in real life you rant against their environmental abuses.

Some people might say that this is dishonest and not a good start to an employer/employee relationship. I agree, but I don't think most companies deserve enough respect to be treated with total honesty anyway.

It would be impossible for some people to cover their true opinions of course. For example, I don't think my anti-establishment rants in this blog and on various prominent sites could be easily disguised, but I don't really care.

I also think that privacy is becoming less of an issue to people who spend a lot of time on-line. If everyone is open about their opinions and activities then it won't really matter what they say on various web sites. If the norm is to say what you really think in public then employers won't have much choice but to accept employees anyway and in that case the need to view personal information on social sites would become unimportant.

There certainly appears to be a lot of concern about privacy on the internet but it seems to be mainly from people who don't use services like Facebook and Twitter (which is where they seem to think privacy standards are being breached). Most people who use these services a lot have a pretty good idea about what they are doing.

Some do let their enthusiasm go too far and should probably back off a little bit on the personal accusations and other controversial and malicious or even potentially libellous comments. On the other hand the internet is the last place where free speech is possible with minimum interference from political or corporate forces so I think it's important to try to preserve that.

People should act responsibly and avoid putting extreme and inflammatory comments in their blog posts and other contributions. Just look at the example I set... yeah, right!

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