Facebook,
the wildly popular online social networking service, and the home where you
eat, sleep, and raise your family don't provide the same level of privacy --
and that's not unreasonable. Debate has flared up again between
advocates of greater privacy on Facebook and people who believe that as long as
you are careful what you post and you have nothing to hide, you don't have to
worry about who sees what you are writing. Employers who ask job applicants for the passwords they use to log in to Facebook are
going overboard. Such a practice is being condemned, and rightfully so. It is
especially egregious because the applicant's friends and acquaintances on
Facebook, who are not a party to the job search, would have their privacy
compromised as well. But while privacy is important in online social settings,
standing up for personal responsibility doesn't mean you are against online
privacy. If I wanted to stay in my house forever -- never to come out again --
I could, and my privacy would be intact. And I could do whatever I want inside
my house. That's my territory. I control what it looks like, how it functions
and what I do inside it. Facebook is entirely different. Mark Zuckerberg and
his buddies in Menlo Park, California, call all the shots. They get to decide
what the environment looks like in my Facebook world. They create the arena in
which I chat with my friends, play with apps and like websites, companies and
causes. They monitor and track everything I do inside their world -- and they
make a lot of money because of the practice. "Users' willingness to share
information is a key part of Facebook's business," reports The Washington Post. "The site makes the bulk of its
money from ads that target users based on their personal information." The
point is that there's nothing truly private about Facebook. The social network
is keenly interested in everything you do, watch, read, play and buy so it can
make big bucks serving you ads. Users need to know this and understand that
their Facebook account isn’t something they actually own and control.
The
answer is to avoid over-sharing personal information on the site or anywhere
else online. If you're smart, you'll curate
your digital presence and keep
your preferences to yourself. Just for fun, you could even game the system and
change your city, birth date and other personal data wherever you have shared
it just to mess with all the many big businesses -- even outside of Facebook -- that perform data mining and
profiling because they know they can profit by knowing more about you. The
recent debate involves the practice of some companies asking prospective
employees to hand over their Facebook login credentials. It's crazy and one has
to wonder why anyone would entertain the thought of working for an enterprise
that would do such a thing. Handing over your password to a potential employer
is a violation of your privacy (and Facebook's privacy policy), but also of
your Facebook friends' privacy. But to look at it from the other side for a
moment, it is also worth considering this: Should someone working for the FBI
or CIA hand over a Facebook password? Should a teacher who has been accused of
inappropriate communication with students? How about sex offenders who are
looking for their first jobs out of prison? Some people might consider asking
those types of applicants for their Facebook logins to be appropriate. So, it
is not a clear-cut issue. In the meantime, the discussion around the topic has
been lively. A recent post of mine discussing the prospective
employee issue addressed how you can make it a non-issue by being careful what
you post online. A peer criticized
that stance as missing the point
about the current privacy debate. But, it is worth remembering that your
Facebook account and your home aren’t the same thing -- not even close.
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