October 01, 2011
Your parents no doubt warned you again and again of the dangers of posting personally revealing information, photos, and videos on social networking sites, such as MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter. At the time you probably rolled your eyes and informed them that there was nothing to worry about since you had privacy settings in place to limit access to your profile pages. You no doubt thought they were worried about internet predators finding you and luring you into secret trysts. Unfortunately, this isn’t the only potential drawback to posting sensitive information online via social networking. Now that many people are savvy to the social media scene, companies are starting to look into user profiles as a way to determine suitability for hire, meaning the content on your pages could result in your inability to find employment.
You might be feeling pretty smug right about now, considering you’ve always made a point of keeping your profiles private. But you can wipe that grin off your face. Although most social media sites claim to offer privacy protection, it’s not like people out to get your information are breaking into Fort Knox. And thanks to an allowance by the Federal Trade Commission, these activities are now sanctioned, at least for Social Intelligence Corp., a company that can access social media reports and sell them to companies looking to hire you. While you can certainly attempt to stave off such access by deleting any offending entries, you might as well disabuse yourself of the notion. Unfortunately, it seems that even when content is deleted from a profile by the user, it may hang around on the site’s servers indefinitely, available to those who are seeking it.
This is pretty bad news for most college graduates, who have spent years unabashedly posting subversive rants, off-color jokes, and drunken photos from spring break. Even worse than the news that your parents were right is the concept that you could be held accountable for things you did in adolescence. Suppose, for example, that you were convicted of petty theft or some other minor offense (or even a felony) as a teenager, maybe due to a stupid prank or some sort of misguided attempt to impress your peer group. At the age of 18, such criminal acts will be expunged from your public record, because you were a child and perhaps not very responsible or aware of consequences. But if you mentioned it to your friends on Facebook, guess what? Those looking to hire you can find it.
Whether prospective employers do their own background check free by simply looking at unprotected social networking pages, or they pay a company to get the full report on those that have been hidden behind a largely transparent veil of privacy protection, the results are the same. They have the ability to access your opinions, preferences, and personality to an uncomfortable degree and use their findings to decide whether or not they want to hire you. Of course, savvy applicant could see this as a godsend, allowing them to present a squeaky-clean image that puts them ahead of the pack. But considering that searches can go back seven years and uncover things you posted when you were fifteen (and still trying to figure out who you were), it would take some serious forethought and planning to pull this move off
