The nice people at NYMag‘s Daily Intel have doubts about Facebook’s latest “profile redesign”:
… Zuckerberg described Timeline as “the whole story of your life in a single page.” Gone are the days of the basic profile with just a name and a photo; Timeline collects everything you’ve ever done on Facebook and makes it easy to browse. That means all the embarrassing photos, relationship updates, wall posts, and status messages will be classified neatly for everyone to see. Or in Zuckerspeak: “All your stories, all your apps, and a new way to express who you are.” As an example, Zuckerberg showed onscreen everything he cooked in the month of September, as cataloged on Facebook. (The bison burgers were “delicious.”)
__
Just how much is ultimately displayed will be customizable, but that’s bound to take a while for everyone to figure out. On your marks, get set … stalk.
But if the NYTimes is correct, it’s too late for anyone to worry about their so-called ‘privacy’, as “Social Media History Becomes a New Job Hurdle“:
A year-old start-up, Social Intelligence, scrapes the Internet for everything prospective employees may have said or done online in the past seven years.
__
Then it assembles a dossier with examples of professional honors and charitable work, along with negative information that meets specific criteria: online evidence of racist remarks; references to drugs; sexually explicit photos, text messages or videos; flagrant displays of weapons or bombs and clearly identifiable violent activity…
__
Mr. Drucker said his goal was to conduct pre-employment screenings that would help companies meet their obligation to conduct fair and consistent hiring practices while protecting the privacy of job candidates.
__
For example, he said the reports remove references to a person’s religion, race, marital status, disability and other information protected under federal employment laws, which companies are not supposed to ask about during interviews. Also, job candidates must first consent to the background check, and they are notified of any adverse information found…
__
Less than a third of the data surfaced by Mr. Drucker’s firm comes from such major social platforms as Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. He said much of the negative information about job candidates comes from deep Web searches that find comments on blogs and posts on smaller social sites, like Tumblr, the blogging site, as well as Yahoo user groups, e-commerce sites, bulletin boards and even Craigslist.
__
Then there are the photos and videos that people post — or find themselves tagged in — on Facebook and YouTube and other sharing sites like Flickr, Picasa, Yfrog and Photobucket…
__
Given complex “terms of service” agreements on most sites and Web applications, Mr. Rotenberg said people do not always realize that comments or content they generate are publicly available.
And, yes, I am away that Kroll Inc. has been pushing the envelope on this kind of “risk consulting” for the past 30 years, but it looks like permitting these virtual-boxspring-searchers total access is moving down the payscale at Moores-Law speed. One reason I’m glad I’m old — state-of-the-art technological humiliation during my college days was the Polaroid, and as far as I know the most potentially embarrassing pics (G-rated, even if not degraded past recovery) involved a Shanna the She-Devil costume at a Star Trek convention.
cleek
hence “cleek” is very careful about not being too specific about his real life in the stuff he writes on the internet.
i actually got called out in an interview about something i’d written on a popular programming forum, years ago.
Samara Morgan
so do you agree with Sandmonkey and Julian Assange naow?
look for Opfacebook in october.
:)
khead
Hi cleek. My name is Kent S. Head. I own a mansion and a yacht.
Gin & Tonic
Like Anne Laurie, I am Old, and all those stupid embarrassing and potentially illegal things were done when a “computer” wasn’t something you carried in your pocket, but something that took up a room or a floor of a building. Now I’m just boring.
I’d hate to be in the position my kids are in now.
Joel
My online life is more boring than my real life.
zzyzx
Yeah the net result of this is that people are going to be LESS likely to share things.
I watched the F8 conference and I was stunned how Facebook didn’t understand that the joke behind the cartoon of, “Mario has just collected his first mushroom. Do you want to post to your wall?” was that no one wants to post something that stupid. They seem to think that the problem is that permission had to be asked first.
If spotify is going to post every song I listen to, I’m not going to let spotify talk with facebook. If Netflix does the same for video, I’m not going to allow Netflix to do that.
Cat Lady
Makes you wonder who of the younger generation will be able to withstand the scrutiny to be president in the future. Weiner’s weiner will seem quaint and charming 20 years from now compared to what kids feel free to document today.
ned
The matrix has you
FlipYrWhig
@cleek: I used to use my real name until I started tangling with a guy on a baseball Usenet group who I later learned was a hard-core racist with multiple prison sentences.
Zifnab
I can’t remember where, but I heard one pundit speculating that kids will just start formally changing their names on graduation from high school / college, purely for the purposes of discouraging this kind of background sniffing.
I’ve known a few friends who were thrilled to get married, if only because that change of last name made search result histories much more narrow.
Jay in Oregon
@Cat Lady:
You know what would be awesome?
If, 20 years down the road, the realization that we all say and do stupid shit that we will regret 20 years down the road makes us stop being such moral scolds.
cleek
@FlipYrWhig:
yipes.
i’ve had days where i wondered if apparently-unstable-internet-douchebag was going to wind up at my door. but i’d be shopping for rottweilers if i learned he was an ex-con.
eemom
henceforth I shall limit my remarks to observations about pie.
murphoney
‘InYourFacebook’…it might take a generation, but this development could re-invigorate an appreciation for the importance of the written word, as more and more adults find their childish/childhood pranks and off-hand private jokes and references taken out of context.
jibeaux
I’m not worried about any racist remarks, sexually explicit stuff, violent stuff, or drug stuff being linked to me because there isn’t any of it, and if that’s their screening criteria to employers, fine. It’s still weird that somebody is going to comb through, say, comments on pictures of my nephew on Flickr or a dresser I sold on craigslist as part of an employment screening, though, even if that information isn’t ultimately provided to the employer. It’s just going to encourage greater anonymity on the internet, which isn’t inherently good or bad, but I do think also leads to more information/remarks that are racist, awful, violent, etc…. I mean, just imagine if you had to sit down in a conversation and say the things to a person that are posted every minute on a youtube comments thread.
Jon Marcus
I wouldn’t invest in that startup. Seems like it’ll have a pretty short shelf-life.
In 20 years, when everyone’s peccadillos are on public display, will anyone care?
cmorenc
This thread reinforces my decision so far to NOT get a Facebook account. It’s far too easy to inadvertently post something that seems innocent enough, directed only at a limited set of people, and later find out that your “privacy” settings don’t limit dissemination of your material nearly the way you thought they did, and that it’s much more possible to take what you posted out of context to seem much less innocent than you had supposed at the time.
Of course, with sites like Social Intelligence bot-trolling the net for every publicly accessible site where you might have identifiably posted anything ever, this problem isn’t at all contained to Facebook accounts. However, Facebook has historically proven to be the most perniciously vulnerable (and too often deliberately so by its masters) to exposing you to grief and regret over your past postings.
No thanks Facebook, however convenient you may be for social networking in many respects.
Jay in Oregon
A quote from one of my favorite books:
“Many names were almost as good as none, when a being wished not to be found. But some name was necessary, if a being wished to be found sometimes.”
zzyzx
Also this whole thing where anyone who is friends of a friend can see all of my posts even if I don’t have them tagged that way sucks.
If you think you have someone locked out but others like him or her and have them friended, then they can see any of your posts that those people reply to.
FlipYrWhig
@Jay in Oregon: Remember that in 1987, Douglas Ginsburg had his Supreme Court nomination yanked for having smoked weed, but ever since 1992 multiple presidential candidates have admitted to some degree of casual drug use, and they’re not even embarrassed about it anymore. These things do shift.
Gin & Tonic
@cleek:
That would be an awful lot of people at your door.
Loneoak
Hopefully someone, someday will hold Cole responsible for all the stupid shit we say.
Stefan
Also, job candidates must first consent to the background check, and they are notified of any adverse information found…
And if you don’t consent, you don’t get the job. So no pressure, really.
FlipYrWhig
@cleek: He was convicted of an email scam in 2005, and in coverage of that trial it was revealed, and I quote, “In 1995, a California judge ordered him to stop putting white-supremacist literature into supermarket products.” Yeah, seriously.
Stefan
One reason I’m glad I’m old—state-of-the-art technological humiliation during my college days was the Polaroid,
Yes, but…even those old 20-40 year old pictures are being scanned and put on the Internet. So if you posed for an embarrassing photo in 1980, with no possible expectation or thought that it would ever be published worldwide, suddenly there it is for everyone to see.
murphoney
@FlipYrWhig:
sure — now it’s casual flirtation with secession
gocart mozart
“No sir, I do not consent”
Hmmm, I wonder why they never called me back. I thought the interview went pretty well.
joes527
Great.
I’m sure that this will bite me because I don’t have a Facebook page, and I don’t twat. (I am on linkedin, but that page essentially just confirms that I am boring)
The next job interview I have, the interviewer will be looking at a report that boils down to: “He is a Luddite.”
gocart mozart
@FlipYrWhig:
Hey! you got swastikas in my peanut butter . . .
Comrade Javamanphil
@Loneoak: Win.
stormhit
@zzyzx:
No they can’t. Comments you leave on someone else’s profile are subject to their privacy settings. Which is logical, and really the only way the website could work. But if friends of friends can see what someone said on your wall, it’s because you have it set that way.
jibeaux
@FlipYrWhig: And see, if I were hiring someone, I really would like to know about a background like that. A 2005 conviction would come up in a conventional background checks, but an out of state 1995 court order might not. I feel conflicted, because I think there are viable reasons for wanting to know if your applicants are violent, racist, sociopaths, and a criminal record isn’t going to tell the whole story; but these methods are creepy.
Paul in KY
@khead: Hi cleek, I am Paul van Lingletoes. I am an astronaut & hold several patents.
Murakami
I wonder what happens when a search like this is done and absolutely nothing comes back.
I don’t use my real name anywhere, other than Linkedin. I’ve been on the net for 20 years but there’s not much at all that was posted under my real name at any point in that time.
Haven’t been in the job hunt for a while, so can anyone tell me: what happens when the background check finds nothing on a person who’s obviously on the net (i.e. not a confused luddite)? Does HR request any or all pseudonyms, email addresses, and other things to help track you down?
Or is a blank slate an automatic disqualifier?
Stefan
I feel conflicted, because I think there are viable reasons for wanting to know if your applicants are violent, racist, sociopaths, and a criminal record isn’t going to tell the whole story; but these methods are creepy.
Most people aren’t violent, racist sociopaths; thankfully their number in the population is vanishingly small. If we’re to avoid turning ourselves into a spy society, with every little detail of everyone’s life laid bare for all the world to see, we’ll just have to take the chance that we’re not dealing with a violent racist sociopath until proven otherwise. It’s otherwise too exhausting to live with that kind of constant paranoid level of surveillance.
Corner Stone
This sounds like an opportunity. It may exist and I’m unaware of it, but what about a techno resume builder for social media?
Pay a company an amount and they’ll build you a Facebook page, populate it with charming stories, trips to museums, talk about your service at the soup kitchen, your neighborhood patrol initiative, etc.
For different amounts they’ll build across a spectrum and add levels of erudite friends who all adore you. For enough money they’ll even add in approving twits about you from your mother in law.
All updated for a monthly fee.
Stefan
@Murakami:
Haven’t been in the job hunt for a while, so can anyone tell me: what happens when the background check finds nothing on a person who’s obviously on the net (i.e. not a confused luddite)? Does HR request any or all pseudonyms, email addresses, and other things to help track you down?
My online pseudonym is “Bob.” Go crazy with the Web search, it’s going to be a lot of fun.
murphoney
If that’s what the company wants to do before hiring you, what will they do after you are hired?
jibeaux
@Stefan: Well, that’s a valid point.
You know another huge problem with this we haven’t discussed yet? A lot of us have the same name as someone else. I have the same name as someone else in my same town, and sometimes people who meet me, know her. I hope she’s not out there posting violent racist sociopathic stuff under our name…
jibeaux
@Corner Stone: Newt Gingrich’s people are intrigued and would like to subscribe to your website.
murphoney
@Corner Stone: Call it “Truman Updates, Inc.”
cleek
all those old Usenet postings are gonna bite me in the ass someday, i’m sure. back in 80-whatever, nobody thought that stuff would hang around forever, or that anybody but the handful of other losers out there would read them in the few weeks they were on the feeds. and i was not a good boy, in the 80s.
alas.
zzyzx
@stormhit: I had someone not just be able to see a post of mine, but be able to comment on it. Could be a glitch I guess… Now I want to verify things… if there is a workaround, I’ll feel better.
Yutsano
Have you seen the new Facebook stormhit? That new little rotating thing in the upper right corner lets you see any friends activity at any time directed to you or not. The only private convosnow are messagesm so Airing of Grievances is no longer limited to just the person you’re talking to. It’s a horrid move.
adamchaz
Wouldn’t people just have buffers from their email and usernames that use for pleasure and the real ones they use for work.
Catsy
@cleek: I could say the same thing in a variety of different areas. Though thankfully the most incriminating stuff was posted on BBSes which long ago disappeared into oblivion forever. There’s time I wish I had some of it archived, and there’s times I’m really glad no one does. :>
FlipYrWhig
@cleek: Most of my Usenet presence involved arguing with people about baseball statistics. Dorkdom within dorkdom.
amk
And people on the lefty blogisthan were having their panties in a bunch over FISA.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Thing that I question is how does Social Intelligence even know they have the right person in their back ground checks? Companies constantly mistake me for my dad and the other five men in the country with the same name as me. So they get someone with a common name like “John Smith” and then what?
Sounds like Social Intelligence entire buisness model is there are enough Dilbetian pointy haired bosses out there stupid enough to use it.
Amir Khalid
When i happen upon a discussion like this, i feel like a real fool because
1. I use my real name here (though not all of it), and
2. everyone here knows where my last job was.
polyorchnid octopunch
@adamchaz: That’s pretty much my approach. That said… I don’t think I’m ever going to work for a large corp(se) ever again. Fuck those guys. Their asses are so tight not even light can escape.
Corner Stone
For anyone concerned about social media scavenging, try a real world experiment. If you haven’t pulled your credit report lately, get a copy.
And be prepared to be amazed at not only the depth of what they know about but also the numerous errors they will have listed.
Just as an example, they had one of my residences as the apt where my ex lived. And she didn’t sign the lease until a full year after official divorce decree. That was the tamest error on there.
Corner Stone
@Amir Khalid: You should feel a little foolish.
ETA, maftoon.
joes527
I did hang around in alt.destroy.the.earth back in the day.
I wonder if that would be seen as a bad thing…
Violet
@cmorenc:
Or Facebook changes the privacy settings, so even if you locked it down under the old settings, it’s now there for the world to see. They’ve done that sort of thing before, as well as had settings go haywire so that everything is exposed, which is pretty much the same thing.
Bulworth
Haven’t been on my FB account in a while. Considering putting it out of its misery now.
Corner Stone
@murphoney: Exactly. And to you and others, the point being that to combat this kind of nonsense until it really is irrelevant, we’re going to need countermeasures. A way to drown the system so even quant programming can’t tell if you really started a neighborhood patrol group or not. Or maybe you started 12, who’s really to say?
Kind of similar to what Wikileaks has done to “official” communications.
Corner Stone
@amk:
People volunteer to populate their Facebook, Twitter, pages.
zzyzx
@cleek: way back in the early 90s, I was in a usenet group that was working as a support group for many people. It got invaded by alt.syntax.tactical and it destroyed the place. I was really pissed off at the time but in retrospect it was an important reminder that just because we thought something was private, didn’t mean that it was.
Amanda in the South Bay
1. I don’t think they realize that even a sanitized background check, removing references to categories that are prohibited from law from being discriminated against, is still discriminatory. What people say/do in their spare time has about as much relevance to their ability to perform their job as their religion, sexual orientation, etc.
2. What are the chances you’ll get hired if you refuse consent?
stuckinred
“Well, Jane, it just goes to show you, it’s always something–if it ain’t one thing, it’s another.”
Q.Q. Moar
I haven’t had the kind of job, recently, where people are going to be doing web searches before they hire me, but at any rate I am insulated because I share a name with a relatively (in)famous dead person. The first 100,000 hits or so on Google are about him. This helps obfuscate the trivial amount of Internet stupidity I have committed under my real name.
CarolDuhart
Either we’re going to have to be very, very forgiving, or hardly anybody is going to have a job anymore. I haven’t done much that’s exciting, but what about my political opinions? My interest in astrology? Most places don’t care about that, but I can see a scenario where I get active and that comes up.
How do they differentiate between the curious, the naive and the virulent? I had opinions once that were basically pretty radical and neanderthal at the same time, but that was years ago, and I was parroting what my folks told me.
We need a Forgiveness Act for the Internet, where some of the stupid stuff you did as a kid gets forgiven somehow.
Cris (without an H)
@cleek: the funny thing is, your personal stuff isn’t that hidden. I mean, I’m just some guy on the internet, and I know your real name. But I suspect a lot of this “profile scraping” doesn’t dig very deep — your modicum of anonymity probably blocks the majority of it.
Kind of like locking up your bike. A dedicated thief can cut your lock. But 19 out of 20 bike thieves don’t want to go to the trouble, because there are plenty of unlocked bikes.
Cris (without an H)
I was surprised by the number of “also known as” line items. I saw variations on my name that I had never seen elsewhere, and really had to wonder where they were coming from.
Marginally related: I was applying for a job at an ISP in Maine, when I balked at the “consent to drug testing” clause of the application. I actually asked the interviewer, “What happens if I don’t sign this?” To which he said, “Don’t worry, everybody here smokes.”
MTiffany
@cmorenc:
It won’t be long now ’til companies start requiring prospective employees to ‘friend’ them on Facebook as part of application process.
amk
@Corner Stone: yeah, don’t tread on my right to be a stoopid idjit on the innernet. The left’s pathological distrust of the gobinment is matched only by the rwnjs’.
cleek
OT: on the bright side, the weeks the libosphere spent freaking out about Perry before anybody even saw him in a debate have proved to be wasted energy. even the mainline GOP thinks he’s nearly unqualified.
@Cris (without an H):
yeah. the goal is to hide from a Google search, when the person is starting with my real name. going the other way is probably easier.
cmorenc
@Q.Q. Moar:
I’m fortunate too in that I have the exact same name as someone who had a long football career in the NFL and in college before that, someone who was a very solid key player who got frequently mentioned in game write-ups, yet wasn’t the sort of star player who’d be any sort of famously recognizable name, except perhaps among ardent fans of the team he played for most of his career.
Any searches for me under my name get buried under an avalanche of search engine references to this football player. This is only annoying the very infrequent times I have a reason to search for my own stuff, and nearly always I can alternately find it in the archives of the particular site I posted it at, albeit then I often have to use a much less convenient or powerful search engine and it’s more work to dig it up.
Cris (without an H)
It occurs to me that if a potential employer collects an online profile of me, they may not be bothered by the content of what I write, but they might take notice that the overwhelming majority of it is posted during business hours.
Judas Escargot
@cleek:
I wonder how many careers have already been ruined by alt.barney.dinosaur.die.die.die?
Cris (without an H)
@cmorenc: Same here! My real name is Orenthal Simpson.
Amanda in the South Bay
@Cris (without an H):
Yeah, I’ve heard HR douchebags mention the time stamps of postings as an indicator as well. God forbid you don’t work a M-F, 9-5 job.
MikeJ
@Judas Escargot: Posting in alt.pave.the.earth could actually help you in getting wingnut welfare.
Paul in KY
@Amanda in the South Bay: You will see how badly they want to hire you.
Nutella
@Violet:
Whatever you do with FB privacy settings, they apply only to what is visible in FB’s own programs. Everything on FB is available to developers who write FB apps. Developers have to promise not to use all that data without checking privacy settings but there are no sanctions at all if they don’t do it correctly other than losing their FB developer account. So there’s nothing to stop the Chinese government, the Russian mob, or the NSA from opening an FB developer account, downloading a ton of ‘private’ data, and then saying ‘oops’ to FB but keeping the data.
Catsy
@Amanda in the South Bay: Or you work in a job that involves a whole lot of running scripts, rebooting servers, uninstalling and installing software, restarting services, compiling code, or other tasks which involve a considerable amount of time spent waiting for something to finish so that you can move on to the next step. Hell, that’s the main reason why I tend to post in spurts and disappear from conversations abruptly.
Fortunately most IT companies I’ve worked for grok this, and if the person doing the hiring gets bent out of shape over it, it’s probably not a company you want to work for–and the person doing the hiring probably doesn’t know a whole lot about the job you’re being hired to do.
Elie
Its pretty horrible. I am not quite old enough to avoid the deep personal biopsies necessary to be employed these days… started for me in 2007 with the last job.
I have a facebook account but rarely use it — I know who my friends are and their email addresses and phone numbers. I call or email them when I want to talk to ’em so don’t really get this facebook thing, though I can see its potential for those who need to “market” themselves in some way. Right now, it just doesnt fit my life fully and I post to it very fitfully…
All of this is just Big Brother. Like the creepy practice of Netflix telling me what I should like from my past choices… like they want to box you in.
catclub
@Elie: “All of this is just Big Brother.”
No! It is _completely_ different from Big Brother if corporations are doing it. It is only creepy if the government does it.
Villago Delenda Est
@Stefan:
While this is true, many of them are in the “club” of the CEOs, and therefore exempt from all this scrutiny. Which is why they keep getting new CEO jobs where they can destroy vibrant companies and pocket the proceeds.
Amanda in the South Bay
@Catsy:
I suppose this brings up the related issue of just how much input HR should have over IT/technical job positions if they don’t know the ins and outs of it. The usual example being a job advertisement that requires 10 years of X technology, when X technology has only existed for 6 years.
I have to admit, its fun and cathartic to bitch about HR and hiring practices, though.
Villago Delenda Est
@Cris (without an H):
The thing about drug testing is that unless your position involves operating heavy machinery, weapons, or driving, it’s pretty much irrelevant to those things directly connected to your position. If you smoke some weed, or drink scotch, while not at work, and said ingestion of intoxicants does not carry over to work, it should be a non-issue.
However, it’s much more about control and intimidation than any actual effects of drugs or alcohol. Power game bullshit, having to do with incompetent twits in middle to upper management.
catclub
@cleek: Weak sauce on Perry being done. The same Rove team that hates him… still hates him. The question is whether they still matter in the GOP powerbrokers crowd.
Cris (without an H)
I’ll go ahead and dissent on this one. That feels creepy (get out of my head, Amazon/Netflix!), but it’s really just a clever use of correlational data.
I would resent it if they somehow restricted my choices based on those recommendations (“You searched for Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil, but our records show you prefer romantic comedies, so we’ve redirected you to Leap Year“), but they’re not actually restricting your choices, just sorting them with educated guesses.
JWL
We’re turning into a country full of J.Edgar Hoovers. What ever happened to minding your own business?
Nutella
@Villago Delenda Est:
Barbara Ehrenreich made that point in Nickeled and Dimed. She also said that the common employment drug test does detect marijuana days after its intoxication is over but only detects alcohol and cocaine while they’re still active in the body. It’s no coincidence that marijuana tends to be the drug of choice for the working class and cocaine for the managerial class.
cleek
@catclub:
it wasn’t just Rove. they also had quotes from Byron York, Malkin, Ewick Ewickson, Kristol, Lowry, Dana Perino, Coulter.
that’s a lot of pessimism from the professional right.
Catsy
@Cris (without an H): I don’t find it creepy, and at this point it’s not even all that clever anymore. It’s just almost always wrong, and sometimes hilariously so.
Part of that is because I have weird and often very specific tastes, but it is also because while each family member can have their own DVD queue, there is only one streaming queue–so I’m often treated to recommendations for, say, Glee or Scooby Doo because they’re similar to something my spouse or kid watches, respectively.
contessakitty (AKA Karen)
@cleek:
But the Tea Party thinks Perry is the best thing since sliced bread so what the mainline GOP thinks means bupkus.
shortstop
@FlipYrWhig: How did he put it “into supermarket products”? I gotta know.
@Loneoak: Hilarious.
@Nutella: Which is another reason not to use the apps on FB. Although if you like Farmville, you probably have worse problems than lack of anonymity.
Amanda in the South Bay
@Cris (without an H):
I’ve watched a lot of Stargate SG-1 on Hulu, and was shocked one day when an ad came on saying “x% of people who like Stargate also like Sliders,” until I realized that it was just the result of an impersonal algorithm. I was sorta amused at how wrong it was-Sliders belongs in that category of “crap I’d never watch,” and after reflection seemed mostly pathetic rather than scary.
Julie
This is why I don’t have a facebook account. That and my sister’s habit of bringing up every embarrassing thing I did in college when we are together in social situations. (She has an account there.) Plus, I’m just too lazy to keep up with it, I would disappear for months at a time and piss off my “friends”. I could never blog for the same reason.
Other people have mentioned me on facebook, but I think mostly in complimentary or neutral situations, so I think I’m all right.
Judas Escargot
@MikeJ:
I wasted several years as one of the resident trolls on alt.philosophy.objectivism, back when I was young and stupid enough to believe that the Rand Virus could be fought and contained through logic and reason. (Ha! Sweet Youth).
I’m pretty sure I’ll never be hired by a finance company or libertarian think-tank.
Ivan Ivanovich Renko
@Paul in KY: Hi, Cleek- I’m Ivan Ivanovich Renko, Polkovnik, retired, Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti.
Amir Khalid
@Corner Stone:
I’d rather you didn’t call me that.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@cleek:
But the punditry on the right didn’t end up having much influence on the progress of 2008 GOP primaries. I agree you are correct that we shouldn’t get too worried about Perry until some actual GOP voters have delivered a verdict on the field, but the same caveat applies to writing him off prematurely just because the chattering classes don’t like what they see. For all we know the GOP voters may dismiss that as so much liburl media talk.
Patience everybody. The Beast slouching from Babylon has only just woken up and hasn’t even gotten out of bed. We don’t know what it will look like yet.
Corner Stone
@amk:
If you can’t tell the difference between people volunteering selected info online, and the government having unbridled power to listen to your personal calls and read your personal mail with no oversight…
FlipYrWhig
@shortstop:
IIRC he was prying open TV-dinner-type foil packages, putting racist notes inside, then resealing them.
catclub
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: But it will probably be ugly.
Lawnguylander
I share a real name with a cartoonist who is published in company newsletters and such as. He’s the first result when googling my name and he’s terrible so I’ve thought of mentioning on my resume and LinkedIn profile that I am not a hack cartoonist.
shortstop
@FlipYrWhig: I’m sorry this guy was scaring you, and racism itself ain’t ever amusing, but the idea of someone earnestly warning Swanson’s Hungry Man Dinner customers against the miscegenation menace is just too funny.
Nutella
Farhad Manjoo objects to FB’s plan that you share everything so your friends can see everything you read/watch/do for this reason: Surely you want to recommend to your friends only the media that you liked. What’s the point of them seeing everything you tried without knowing whether you thought it was good or not?
Bunter
@murakami I am looking for work, and I had an application that requested all my email addresses, the address of any blog(s) I write, Twitter handle, Tumblr address and Facebook page information. True that’s only one application but I hadn’t seen that two years ago when looking for work. I gave them nothing because I didn’t find it relevant to the position for which I was applying.
Judas Escargot
@FlipYrWhig:
Yet another reason to avoid Salisbury steak.
Paul in KY
@Nutella: Some tests for mary jane can actually tell if you’ve ever done it only once. That said, they usually have a threshhold for a positive. Most employers, certainly those who hire for factory jobs, know that if you are too hard with that test, they’ll never hire anyone.
Paul in KY
@Ivan Ivanovich Renko: You’re lucky, the people hiring over here can’t read Russian.
Lawnguylander
As far as tampering with food packaging at supermarkets goes, judges ain’t tryna hear arguments like, “what’s on the inside is so much more disgusting.” Believe me, they ain’t. Thus far, I have remained in compliance with the court order not to put goatse stickers on all the cilantro packages. But it’s tough, man.
Cris (without an H)
Hungry White Man
Ivan Ivanovich Renko
@Bunter: They’ll get my official looking-for-a-job email address and my official i’m-an-old-fuck-with-grandkids FB page and that is all. They can kiss my
RussianSoviet ass.sherifffruitfly
This privacy whining is fucking stupid.
If you want privacy, DON’T PUT YOUR SHIT ON TEH INTERTUBEZ.
durr.
FlipYrWhig
@shortstop: He actually wasn’t scary online — I figured he was just a blowhard who had a conspiratorial view about why the baseball team we both liked wasn’t trying harder to win. It was afterwards, when I realized that he was genuinely deranged, that I thought it would best not to let the next online screwball know who I really was.
SiubhanDuinne
@Amir Khalid:
Hmmm. I don’t think I know.
shortstop
@Bunter:
And that’s why never using our real names while we run our mouths across the intertubes isn’t enough. You don’t want to have your anonymous commentary linked to an email address that can identify you.
ETA: Nice job on the last crime-scene photographs for Lord Peter. I really like what you did with the angle and framing.
Spaghetti Lee
Fuck facebook, fuck Zuck, fuck the whole social media ‘revolution’. Just a way for busybodies to go snooping around in things they don’t need to look at. Back in ’08-’09 I was too lazy/unmotivated to set up an FB account. Now, I think it’s one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.
CarolDuhart
@Bunter: Who was trying to hire you? The CIA?
Corner Stone
@Bunter: Who would ever give this info? I’m going to give a potential employer the email addy I use strictly for eBay?
Don’t think so.
Amir Khalid
@SiubhanDuinne:
I’ve mentioned my former employer (The Star, a Malaysian newspaper) here a few times, and even linked to their website once.
Intercalation
@Paul in KY: No, no such technology exists. The hair tests can see back many months, or even longer depending upon how long your hair is, but those tests have threshold issues and higher false positive rates and are slower, more expensive, less reliable and less popular than the usual piss test.
cs
@Bunter:
Thanks for the info. I was afraid companies would start doing that.
SiubhanDuinne
@Amir Khalid:
Thanks. Yes, you have. I am simply burdened with a poor memory.
Citizen_X
@joes527:
Depends. Are you a Republican?
In that case, no.
amk
@Corner Stone: yea, yeah, the gobinment is teh ebil. I get it.
Corner Stone
@amk: derp derp derp.
Moron.
Corner Stone
@amk: If you can’t tell the difference, not a problem for me.
Moran.
Corner Stone
“My name’s amk and i likes the gobinment reading my shit!”
Corner Stone
“I’m amk and anyone who isn’t down with the gobinment reading their shit and listening to their shit just isn’t down with me!”
Corner Stone
God, go back to the CCCP you dumb fuck.
amk
@Corner Stone: your teabaggerish paranoia is so roflamo. And 4 posts within 4 minutes to show your poutrage shows your 3rd grade level of thinking
amk
@Corner Stone: Make that 5 dumb posts in 5 minutes. Aren’t you supposed to be in some townhall with your ridiculous hat and costume ?
Corner Stone
@amk: Yep. I’m not sure I want to trust the govt to do what’s right by me when they sniff my personal data with no oversight.
Glad you can sleep better at night knowing they got you covered.
As long as they keep you safe! Right?
amk
@Corner Stone: I guess you spend your waking moments (and probably your insomniac sleeping moments too) looking for the ebil gobinment to come and get you. Go get a fucking life, you freaky paranoid.
opal
@amk:
Just pie him and be done.
His sole remaining purpose in life is to start shit on blogs.
Corner Stone
@Amir Khalid: Sure. I apologize.
Bad attempt at humor.
Corner Stone
@amk: You remind me of all the wingnuts I know.
“They can read anything they want, as long as they keep me safe.”
“I’ve got nothing to hide!”
“If you haven’t done anything wrong then why are you concerned?”
“If they want to be bored they can spy on me!”
Obviously, the principle on this matter has escaped you. It’s about a government with unlimited power having no oversight. Now, call me crazy, but that seems somehow un-American in nature.
Ecks
@Stefan:
FTFY ;)
I once posted a comment on a newspaper story about sports under my real name. Now when my name is googled it’s one of the top things that comes up, and while it wasn’t a terrible thing to say it’s not the professional image I’d want out there for potential employers. I asked the newspaper to take it down when I was on the job market and they refused. I’m never ever posting anything EVER under my real name again. Anywhere, ever, no matter how innocuous.
Bill D.
What will you do when one company owns all of those and they automatically share their info on you? One more reason why I’m not on Facebook since they are both privacy bad guys and rich enough to buy other companies and services. However, that also means that avoiding Facebook (temporarily) is no panacea.
Paul in KY
@Intercalation: I had read somewhere of tests (not the hair test) used by Olympic level testing facilities that had those capabilities.
Certainly could be wrong about this, though. Actually hope you are right :-)