Google CEO Exposes Dark Side of Social Networking

Posted on Aug 19, 2010 in Records Management News

Google CEO Eric Schmidt puts the con­cept of online pri­vacy in the spot­light once again
By Tony Bradley, PC World

August 18, 2010 09:51 AM ET

Google CEO Eric Schmidt fears that too much infor­ma­tion is shared online, and pre­dicts that peo­ple will one day change their name and rein­vent them­selves in order to escape their dig­i­tal past. That point of view might be extreme, but it is true that social net­work­ing has forced us to more closely exam­ine and rede­fine the con­cepts of pri­vacy and identity.

There are many excit­ing ben­e­fits to the evo­lu­tion of the Web and the rise of social net­work­ing. Face­book and Twit­ter have enabled peo­ple to recon­nect with friends and fam­ily, and pro­vide a plat­form for shar­ing infor­ma­tion and stay­ing in touch. The real-time aspect of social net­work sta­tus updates has also trans­formed online search and break­ing news.

The Real Impact of Video on Your Net­work: View now
The prob­lem is that social net­work­ing also pro­vides a very pow­er­ful tool for embar­rass­ing your­self or ruin­ing your rep­u­ta­tion on a global and vir­tu­ally eter­nal scale. Once you put it online, it is shared around the world in sec­onds, and can still be recalled after decades.

You’re Hired

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It is not uncom­mon now for the job appli­ca­tion process to include shar­ing your social net­work­ing account infor­ma­tion. Tech savvy employ­ers want to be able to check out your Face­book pro­file and your tweet his­tory on Twitter.

What you say and how you act online says a lot about you. Exam­in­ing your online per­sona gives employ­ers a raw and unfil­tered glimpse at who you really are, and is a much more effec­tive tool for screen­ing poten­tial employ­ees than the psy­cho­log­i­cal per­son­al­ity or apti­tude tests relied on in years gone by.

You’re Fired

There is a long and grow­ing list of sto­ries of peo­ple los­ing their job as a result of Face­book sta­tus updates or Twit­ter tweets. It is gen­er­ally a bad idea to bad mouth your boss or your job on a social net­work­ing site, or to post pics and sta­tus updates about how much fun you’re hav­ing at the beach after you called in sick.

One poor soul learned this les­son the hard way–possibly cost­ing him a job at Cisco before he even started. Employ­ers are watch­ing, so let­ting the world know that you hate the job you have been offered is a quick way to get that offer rescinded.

What’s Your (Friend’s) Credit Score?

It’s all about who you know. In this case, who you know could make or break whether or not you can get a loan. Some banks are using ser­vices like Rapleaf to scan your social net­work and iden­tify con­tacts con­nected with you that also do busi­ness with the finan­cial insti­tu­tion. Based on the finan­cial sta­bil­ity and credit his­tory of your social net­work con­nec­tions, the bank can make an assump­tion about what sort of credit risk you might be.

Till Death Do Us Part

It seems fair to assume that your spouse would be a Face­book friend, and a part of your Twit­ter­verse. Why not? Love is grand, and you want to share every­thing with your partner…until you don’t. If the rela­tion­ship goes south, you may want to unfriend your ex and be care­ful what you say online.

A Time Mag­a­zine arti­cle explains “Lawyers, how­ever, love these sites, which can be evi­den­tiary gold mines. Did your husband’s new girl­friend Twit­ter about get­ting a piece of jew­elry? The court might regard that as mar­i­tal assets being dis­bursed to a third party. Did your wife tell the court she’s inca­pable of get­ting a job? Then your lawyer should ask why she’s pur­su­ing job inter­views through LinkedIn.”

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