6/24/08

Privacy in a world bereft of privacy, part 2


Phoebe Connelly of Tapped:
Here's another example--when will the generation hit when a majority of young job applicants will have an online record of their youthful indiscretions? We're all warned to be careful of our Facebook or MySpace profiles, and I've watched friends hit the point where they pull down or (attempt to) scrub the internet of drunken photos and juvenile blogs. But as social networks explode, aren't we going to hit a point where a large number of high school students have lived a very public online life: Twitter, Facebook, blogs, etc? Will there come a time when employers Googling a prospective hire turn a blind eye to your online record because, hey, everyone was young once?

Equally likely is that many employers will use this as leverage against their employees. I think it will take at least a generation to work out a new balance once there is an almost complete lack of privacy.

In the short term, I expect that more savvy parents will impress upon their kids from an early age that it is very, very important to use pseudonyms whenever possible, and not to trust the privacy controls of their social networking sites.

(Photo is of Tapped's Connelly, left, perhaps an example of the sort of thing about which she is talking)

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