As per today's article in the ieee Spectrum by Robert Charette, the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services as well as the Norman, Oklahoma Police Department are apparently both requiring prospective job candidates to turn over the passwords to their social media accounts (Facebook, Myspace, etc) as part of background screening. I'm sure this isn't going to be a rare and isolated demand on the part of employers going forward. But it's one thing to google up someone's name, check their public Facebook and Myspace pages for dirt. It's an entirely different thing to hand over passwords to these accounts.

Now, I don't have a Facebook account simply because I disagree with the default loss of personal privacy one must accept to utilize the social networking site. Is my lack of a Facebook account going to throw up red flags the next time I am looking for a job? I can see it now - I'm sitting across from an interviewer and they ask "So, we, you know, require that you provide us with your Facebook password. It's for our safety you understand, and we promise we won't friend Michael Dukakis while we're checking you out."

Me: "Oh, I'm really sorry but I don't have a Facebook account, is that a problem?"

Interviewer: "Well, uh... I'm not sure. This hasn't come up before. Is there a reason you don't use Facebook? Are you trying to hide something? Don't you have any friends??"

This is going to become a more and more serious issue... Mark my Zuckerbergs.

"Facebook users who check in to a store or click the "like" button for a brand may soon find those actions retransmitted on their friends' pages as a "Sponsored Story" paid for by advertisers.

Currently there is no way for users to decline this feature."

Read the full story here if you use Facebook: Yahoo! News

It seems that Facebook plans to milk you for all you got if you let 'em.

I came across an interesting blog post about the evolution of Facebook privacy over the last 5 years. It's by Matt McKeon, a developer at IBM Research's Center for Social Software.

Just link yourself over here and click through the timeline links on the right side.

If your privacy is important to you, learn about it and take control.

A good friend of mine has been going through the process of removing himself from Facebook. As privacy concerns become more and more an issue on the site, all of us should be making a determination for ourselves just where we stand on the issue of online privacy.

Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook believes that online privacy is a thing of the past; that we wish to live our lives in a transparent fashion. Think along the lines of the 1998 movie "The Truman Show" where Truman Burbank, played by Jim Carrey, lives his life on camera, unaware he is the star of a TV show about himself. Now Zuckerberg is probably correct in that some of us do apparently have no issues broadcasting ourselves into the public at large. I remember having dinner at a restaurant recently and enjoying a fellow diner's loud conversation with his wife... on a Nextel no less. Beep Beep! I'm sure he doesn't mind that he is broadcasting himself on Facebook either.

The issue is, however, that on Facebook and their new affiliated sites (Pandora, Yelp, Microsoft, et. al.) you have to make a dedicated effort to opt-out of sharing your personal information. You need to take time and read through the myriad privacy options and see just what you are sharing with whom. If you don't, you are sharing everything you ever posted, wrote, and typed, your email address, your photos, with everyone. Do remember that on Facebook, 'everyone' means the wide world of the internet, not just all your friends.

So however you feel about your privacy, take an hour and review what you've been sharing on Facebook. You just might be surprised. For those looking to deactivate or delete your account, Elinor Mills over at CNET just posted an excellent article with details on what deactivation means and how to find the delete button.

With Facebook and Zuckerberg pushing the envelope of what your privacy means, this is one time we all need to be proactive to make sure we aren't being sold out while we sleep.


CNET article: http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-20005556-245.html

The neverending saga of Facebook privacy issues:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Facebook

Facebook

Wouldn't it just figure that the day I add Twitter and Facebook widgets to the pages here, they get shut down by denial of service attacks? On the Twitter blog, the co-founder of Twitter, Biz Stone writes, "Attacks such as this are malicious efforts orchestrated to disrupt and make unavailable services such as online banks, credit card payment gateways, and in this case, Twitter for intended customers or users."

While there is no doubt that no one wants to be the target of a DOS attack, I find it more than a little humorous that he likened the attack on Twitter to damaging attacks on banks and financial services. It's inconvenient, but I'm pretty sure we'll survive.

I'll try re-enabling the Twitter widget tomorrow.