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It seems like everyone is doing it these days...”Social Networking” or “SN”. General sites such as MySpace, FaceBook, Linkedin, Ning, Twitter, Friendster, Tumblr, Habbo, Qzone, Vkontakte, Bebo, hi5, Orkut and a whole group of other online niche communities revolving around hobbies (wine, cigars), sports (horse racing, fishing, lacrosse), health, pets, child raising, religions and politics to name just a few.
The mechanics of each SN site are essentially the same: Once you sign up, you create a custom profile (information about yourself) and start typing and posting pictures and links onto your home page. You can add friends to your group and accept the invitation of others to become friends to their identity.
However, you should give some thought to the following “privacy” factors:
1. Before joining a SN site, think about why you’re joining. Many sites have specific purposes. For example, aside from the very specific communities discussed above, some general sites may specialize in locating relatives or classmates, others may be more suited to professional communications or looking for employment, or perhaps are useful as a dating service. Think about why you’re joining before signing up. Just like you wouldn’t join a golf community if you don’t intend to play golf, you shouldn’t join a site geared toward pairing up singles if you aren’t interested. FaceBook is great for sharing news, photos and videos with people who might care, like family and close friends. MySpace consists of mostly a teen and pre-teen crowd, heavily focused on pop music and do-it-yourself page designs. Linkedin is geared more toward the professional set, establishing a network of current and former business colleagues. Also, if you’re going to post the minutia of your life several times a day, Twitter might be more appropriate than FaceBook, because short microblogs would be perfect for Twitter, but might overwhelm your FaceBook friends and relatives to the point where they might tune you out. [Using a pseudonym (another name) doesn’t seem to suit SN, since the point is to create a group of friends that get to know you, not some creation.] FourSquare and other locational services such as Groupon are more useful for finding deals in your immediate proximity. Besides, it’s a violation of most sites’ terms and conditions.
And, of course,it’s your choice to share with the world your purchasing habits (Blippy.com (your purchases and locations); Facebook "Open Graph" which promotes user sharing of everything you do online automatically by default. Among the activities Facebook wants you to share: Your travel plans, what you're eating, what you're cooking, what you're drinking (thanks to a wine app), what you're buying, the videos you're watching, the books you're reading, your location and more; Nike FuelBand (your physical activity); Fitbit Aria (your weight shown on your scale); You get the idea. [More about whether this is good or bad under the Privacy page.]
2. If you know why you have joined a SN site, you should still seek to get a good idea of who your audience is. While you’ll never personally know something about everyone in your circle, you should at least have a good idea about your immediate smaller circle of friends, so that your communications are meaningful to them and aren’t offensive. Good advice is to start slowly with your family and close friends, then pick your friends carefully after that. Make sure you learn something about your “friend” before meeting personally. Take the case of the Belgian supermarket manager who struck up a friendship, later a date, with a woman called Katrien Van Loo on Facebook. When he showed up for a dinner date at her apartment, he was met by two men who overpowered him, bound and gagged him, then stole his keys and robbed the safe in his supermarket. We all know people who advertise that they have literally thousands of “friends” as if this somehow validates their popularity (thank you Ashton Kutcher and Charlie Sheen). If you’re one of those people, I can’t help you. Still, it may be useful if you’re a politician or movie star. Even worse, from a privacy point of view, are those people who take Tweets one step further: they “Blip” (on Blippy.com; see also FourSquare.com and Gowalla.com), which automatically posts the details of their credit card purchases with their friends (e.g. Joe spent $47.60 at Macy's for Jockey shorts”). Apparently, this shows their friends that they drink coffee at Starbucks or buy computers at Best Buy. Also, Alfred, which suggests similar places in your favorite geographic locations. Sounds dangerous, this kind of “sharing” but I can visualize a certain generation of people doing this.
3. You also should probably not mix your personal and business information on the same SN site. Jokes, games and other comments that might be appropriate for your buddies might offend your family. Ribbing from your siblings might be read by your office mates and come back to haunt you. You might not be projecting the image to either group that you want following you in that group.
4. SN is pretty much a form of written communication, so it goes without saying that you have to be careful about what you write. According to a 2009 study by Internet security firm Proofpoint, 8% of companies with more than 1,000 employees have fired someone for social media actions. That’s a lot, and the number of firings is increasing each year.
Ask Gilbert Gottfreid, the voice of the Aflac duck, who got sacked in 2011 for posting jokes considered by Aflac to be inappropriate on his Twitter feed after the Tsunami in Japan. Or, almost simultaneously, when an employee of New Media Strategies, Chrysler’s ad agency was dismissed for posting a comment joking that “it’s ironic that Detroit is the motor city yet no one here knows how to #?#!! drive.” Even Charlie (“I’m just high on Charlie”) Sheen killed his show, if not his career, due in some part to his YouTube and Twitter postings.
Of course, you don’t want to be truly stupid and write on your FaceBook page threatening to detonate pipe bombs on the D.C. subway system as did Awais Younis, who then managed to get himself federally indicted in January 2010 for interstate communication of a threat. That’s obvious. [He was sentenced in March, 2011 to time served plus 2 years supervised release.]
But if your twitters or blogs mention certain people or companies (particularly if they’re your employer), especially in a negative context, you may also expect repercussions from your comments. You should be aware that these days, many companies have explicit policies regarding employees’ discussion of their employer or their job and that they also employ sophisticated software sniffing the Internet for intellectual property and individual information, right down to your personal posts. Companies like Websense, Barracuda Networks, TNS Cymphony, QuantCast, BlueKai, Media6Degrees and Cyveillance provide services for this purpose. RightNow’s Cloud Monitor and soon Salesforce.com are offering cloud monitoring specifically for Twitter and YouTube. Dis your employer and you can expect to get fired...or worse. Take the following examples: The 16 yr. old British girl (Kimberly Swann) who in 2009 was fired for complaining on FaceBook, “I’m so totally bored!!” Or Stacy Snyder, denied her teaching degree because of a posted photo on MySpace showing her wearing a pirate hat and drinking from a plastic cup. Get the point? On the other hand, the November, 2010 NLRB complaint against American Medical Response of Connecticut upheld an employee’s (Dawnmarie Souza) right to talk negatively about supervisors or working conditions (she called her boss a “dick” and a “scumbag”), despite company regulations to the contrary, finding it to be “protected speech” whether at the water cooler or on FaceBook. AMR, in countering, said there was much more to her behavior that got her fired. [But it can’t be negative personal comments about a supervisor’s sexuality, for example.] The case settled in February, 2011 without public ruling. How about Ashley Johnson, the 22-year old waitress in North Carolina who was fired in 2010 for calling a customer “a cheap bastard.” One of the larger firings came from Virgin Atlantic in 2008, which fired 13 employees over a FaceBook chat. Then there’s New England Patriot’s cheerleader Caitlin Davis, 18, who in 2008 was cut from the squad over controversial photos from a Halloween party where she posed with a passed-out man covered with graffiti, including swastikas, anti-semitic remarks and profanity. Continuing the sports references, Dan Leone, a stadium operations employee for the Philadelphia Eagles was fired in 2009 for writing “Dan is *** devastated about Dawking signing with Denver...Dam Eagles R Retarded!” Even the mascots got in on the act: In June, 2010, 24 year old Andrew Kurtz, a Pittsburgh Pirates mascot was fired after posting a derogatory comment about the team’s choice to extend the contracts of two of its managers. For some reason, nurses seem to get in trouble a lot: in April, 2009, a Minnesota nursing home employee was fired after rumors spread that she had been posting nude photos of herself with nude patients on her Facebook page. None were found, but she was nevertheless fired. In June, 2010, five employees at the Tri-City Medical Center in San Diego were fired after they were discovered discussing patients on Facebook in violation of privacy laws. You also might not want to advertise for a hitman, like Gloria Gadsden, a professor at East Stradsbourg University in Pennsylvania, who posted a three-minute long video on Facebook stating “Does anyone know where I can find a very discreet hitman? It’s been that kind of day.” You might not want to admit to any addictions, either. In May, 2010, Dana Kuchler, a veteran (21 yr.) police dispatcher for West Allis, Wisconsin, was fired (punishment later reduced to a 30 day suspension) after posting that she was “addicted to vicodin, adderall, quality marijuana, MD 20/20 grape and absinthe” on her Facebook page. Humor won’t protect you, either. Take the case of South Carolina firefighter and paramedic Jason Brown, who in February, 2011 was fired for creating a three minute video (LINK) posted on Facebook, showing a cartoon doctor and paramedic responding to an emergency in a hospital. Don’t get caught calling in sick, either: In April, 2009, a Swiss woman called in sick with a migraine, saying the light from her computer screen would severely bother her. She was fired after she apparently could sit in front of a computer screen, as she was well enough to post on Facebook that day. And it’s undecided whether the Facebook Like button is protected speech, although a court in Virginia upheld the firing of a Sherrif’s employees, one of whom clicked the Like button on the page of the Sheriff’s political opponent, on the ground that the button was not protected free speech. Ashley Payne, a high school teacher in Georgia, was fired in August, 2009 after she posted photos on Facebook showing her sipping beer and wine while she was on vacation and was visiting a brewery in Ireland. (She’s appealing this one.) For more employment faux see below t #11.
Of course no one beats the damage resulting from alleged posting of drug cartel denunciations in Mexico. In September, 2011, a man and a woman, both in their 20s, were found hanging from a pedestrian bridge in Mexico near Laredo, TX (not an uncommon cartel punishment), brutally mangled, next to a sign declaring that they were killed for posting denouncements of drug cartel activities on their (Mexican) social network.
Moreover, once you post a comment, it can’t be taken back. With search engines keeping “caches” of changed or deleted pages, Facebook retaining pokes, shadow profiles, tags, deleted postings and messages (including chat messages) virtually forever, and computers being able to copy and store pages, nothing “deleted” from the Web it every truly gone. In 2012, ARS Technica found that even three years later, photos tagged for removal hadn’t been "deleted" from Facebook. If you have a direct link to the image file on Facebook's servers, they’re still there. Facebook claims that on older legacy systems they’re having problems with deletions, but not with the newer software versions. Do you trust that? These things may come to haunt you when you look for another job or seek acceptance for some other position (e.g. on your homeowners association or local baseball team, cheerleading squad or charity) and can follow you around forever. Take the case of the well-known Canadian psychotherapist Andrew Feldmar, 66, who was recently permanently denied entry to the U.S. because of an article he wrote in a journal describing his experiment with LSD over thirty years before. So think first, post later. Why do I post so many of these examples? ‘Cause so many people don’t believe me. I’ve created my own acronym for this - IWHTM. It means It Won’t Happen To Me. I have no doubt that those real people discussed above felt IWHTM, just as most texting and FaceBook obsessed people today do. It can happen to you!
According to a recent survey of 2,300 adults about social networking, the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that 12 percent said they had shared information on line that they later regretted posting. And, just because your boss or prospective boss may seem too old to be part of the FaceBook crowd, don’t dismiss him or her reading your page, as many hire college-age people to befriend potential hires or employees to check them out. Oversharing on FaceBook has become so rampant that there’s even a FaceBook group, Fired Because of FaceBook, devoted to this phenomenon. Also, the phrase “dooced,” which has come to mean “getting fired for something you’ve written on a website” and which originated when Heather B. Armstrong from Salt Lake City, who wrote a blog under dooce.com (she says the name came about when she had trouble quickly spelling “dude” when texting), was fired in February, 2001 after writing stories on her blog which included people in her workplace.
5. It also goes without saying that you can be subject to legal liability, either jail time, fines or civil penalties, for violation of any number of criminal or civil laws. Consider: On March 16, 2012 Rutgers University student Dhuran Ravi was convicted by a Middlesex, N.J. jury on 15 charges of hate crimes (including bias intimidation, invasion of privacy, witness and evidence tampering and other offenses) stemming from a webcam video which he surreptitiously posted on the Internet of a gay encounter between his roommate (Tyler Clementi) and another man, as well as Ravi’s follow up Twitter comments. The direct result of this action led to Clementi’s immediate suicide by jumping off the George Washington Bridge. Further charges were not presented against Ms. Molly Wei, who was also involved, probably because she became a witness for Ravi’s prosecution. Both students withdrew from Rutgers following the incident. This incident resulted in N.J.’s anti-bullying law, the strongest in the nation.In another case, U.S. nurse William Melchert-Dinkel was convicted of persuading a British man (Mark Drybrough) and Canadian woman (Nadia Kajouji) to commit suicide through communications over the Internet. Finally, there’s the worst case scenario: On February 1, 2012, the Iranian Supreme Court confirmed the death sentence for computer programmer Saeed Malekpour, whose photography program was used without his knowledge to upload pornography to the Internet, a real no-no in the muslim countries.
6. Equally important is not just what you post, but what your friends post as well. Their posts may be embarrassing to you or create unforeseen problems, even if not intentional. The same is true of your posts on their sites. Remember, posts or photos can be seen by everyone on your site and also be seen through “tags” that your friends put on their sites back to yours. Don’t put anything on there that you wouldn’t want your mom, or boss or minister to see. I won’t even dare comment on the negativity of posting marital, family or friendship arguments on line in order to see how your friends judge your debate. While such score-settling is great viewing on the (short-lived 2010 Seinfeld show) The Marriage Ref, it generally divides people and leads your friends to distance themselves. Such sites as LameBook attest to people’s interest in watching on-line spats, but in real life most of us want to steer clear of fighting couples.
7. Pictures can be so much more damaging than text. Most sites allow you to share photos, pictures, videos and links, but that doesn’t mean that you should. Any photos of you or anyone else you know that may be in any way compromising (your drunk brother riding the mechanical bull at the bar where he was supposed to be on a “business” trip) or offensive (any state of undress) should be absolutely off limits. That “joke” photo you post may not look so funny when your boss or friend’s wife sees it, and you could very easily damage friendships, marriages (that “I never liked her anyway” comment might not bode well for you if they get back together, for example) or employment (photos of the office Christmas party that show your boss “with” his secretary). And you should never post photos of others without their express permission. And consider this: When you’re posting photos taken with a GPS enabled smart phone or camera device using such services as Twitter, Foursquare or Gowalla with your mobile device, you should be aware that specific information such as your location [by precise latitude and longitude], type of camera, camera settings and other information can be revealed through the “geotags” embedded in your photos. This information isn’t visible on the photo, but it is embedded as encoded meta-data within the photo itself. Just ask Adam Savage, host of the popular science program “MythBusters,” who should have known better when he posted a photo on Twitter of his automobile parked in front of his house, which let viewers know that he drove a Toyota Land Cruiser and showed a photo of his house and its exact location. Even more, the caption “Now it’s off to work...” let potential thieves or intruders know that he would not be at home. For that matter, in September, 2010, police in New Hampshire have arrested a group of men suspected of being part of a burglary ring that targeted FaceBook users who had reported that they were away from home. Can you say “too much information”? It takes a little work to disable the geotag feature, but if you value your privacy generally or don’t want to be found specifically, you should remember to do this. [Click HERE to learn how. Click HERE for a free Windows app (GeoSetter) which allows you to edit the geodata in image files.] It’s not just photos - games, mobile browsers and even screen savers report back data. And it’s now just your location. Sometimes, it’s your address book and browser history. On iOS and Android phones, you can turn off AdSense and AdMob behavior tracking in Google's apps settings. (For example, on iOS devices, look for Ad Preferences and work through the various screens.) To disable Apple's iAd behavior tracking on iOS 4 devices, type http://oo.apple.com in Safari's address window. You should get a notification that you've successfully opted out. And, for those of us who really do want everyone to know where we are, in August, 2010 FaceBook announced the creation of FaceBook Places, which lets your FaceBook friends know exactly where you are at any given time. Just don’t forget to turn it off if you want privacy.
8. Some topics are best left untouched. Just as you might not feel right discussing sex, politics or religion at a dinner with your family, clergy or boss, you should stay away from these topics on line. While you might not be running for nomination to the Supreme Court, the comments you make may be collected and available long after you have removed them from your site, and could cause damage to you or others. Discussions about things happening (or look like they’re happening) at work, comments about family or friends going through a break-up or divorce, or about legal or tax issues might not look so good after the event, and will live on long afterwards. Moreover, some things shouldn’t be done on line. Medvet, an Australian company which provides drug, paternity and other tests, was hacked in 2011, revealing confidential information I’ll bet their customers didn’t want revealed. You might want to take care of these things in person, and not give up your digital wallet so fast. I won’t even begin to discuss the Rupert Murdock News of the World phone hacking debacle, all over the news in July, 2011.
9. Don’t text in a moment of anger or when under the influence of alcohol or other proscribed substances. Also, if you’re suffering from a lack of sleep. Under such conditions, your emotions can often overpower your sense of reason, allowing you to post statements that you otherwise wouldn’t. Unfortunately, this is so common that Twitter has coined the terms “DWEET” (drunk Tweet) and MISTWEET (Tweet later regretted). Luckily, if you’re prone to such lapses in judgment, Google actually has a setting (“Mail Googles”) that asks you to solve a math problem before you can send e-mail late at night or on weekends. If you’re unsure, just wait for a little while and think about what you’re about to send.
10. Don’t be afraid to “unfriend” someone who may cause you trouble, or who you’re simply tired of. Most sites don’t even let the friend know that they’ve been unfriended by enabling a “hiding” feature. And, on the same topic, you should be familiar with all of the privacy settings on your site, using all of the options to craft your site so it’s acceptable to you.
11. Interestingly, Microsoft recently surveyed some 2500 Human Resources managers, recruitment professionals and consumers in 2009 to determine the effect of personal information published on-line with respect to employment opportunities. The results were astounding: While 70% of the HR and recruiters claim to have rejected employment based on information found on-line, only 7% of consumers believed that the personal details published on the Web had any impact on their job prospects! CNN reports that 78% of job recruiters check search engines for background on candidates and 63% check social media sites, too. So, think first, post later...Just because you CAN express your thoughts doesn’t mean that you HAVE to! [If you’re an employer, you should be aware that the “nuclear option” of complete prohibition rarely works; much more useful is the education of employees, combined with security measures and monitoring of company data over public networks.]
Other employment faux pas: The “Cisco Fatty” incident, where a graduate student who scored a paid internship at Cisco, then promptly tweeted that “Now I have to weigh the utility of a fatty paycheck against the daily commute and hating the work”; The “Facebook Fairy” move, after Kevin Colvin claimed a family emergency on Halloween while his co-workers saw a time-stamped photo on Facebook showing him dressed as a fairy and holding a beer; The five employees of the National Hispanics of Buffalo who were fired after complaining on Facebook about their company (while they didn’t post from work, their speech is technically protected under labor law and this and another 13 instances of terminations based on social media complaints were defended by the NLRB); the Walmart employee fired for posting remarks like “The Government needs to step in and set a limit on the kids people are allowed to have based on their income. If you can’t afford to feed them, you shouldn’t be allowed to have them!”; Inappropriate blogging about topics, even anonymously, such as your sex life, like former congressional staff assistant Jessica Cutler who blogged about details of her sex life, including being paid in exchange for sex. She was outed, fired, sued by one of the men she mentioned and had to declare bankruptcy; The Starbucks employee fired after posting a creative YouTube video of him singing criticisms of their customers, and an advertising exec named James Andrews who tweeted negative remarks about FedEx’s home town (Memphis) the day before meeting with them; A reporter fired from a newspaper after his mean spirited remarks to a PR professional and her reply tweets escalated over the Internet; Posting photos of your personal life as a teacher can be bad enough, but don’t compound it by making fun of a student’s haircut or calling students “germ bags” - it may get parents to demand dismissal. And so it continues - you can see the trend.
12. Don’t click on links or respond to Tweets that you aren’t familiar with. This is how many viruses and spyware propagate. (See SPYWARE for more on this.) You may not even see the damage on your own computer, because it may be used to send out messages allegedly from you to others that contain viruses or spyware.
True examples: You may receive a Tweet from one of your friends, but it appears to offer a $500 Victoria’s Secret gift card (if you’ll just click), or ask you to watch your friend in an awesome new video in which they star (if you’ll just click) or help you to make more money or increase your IQ (if you’ll just click), or click to open “the sexiest video ever” on FaceBook or answer the question “Are You in This Picture” (if you’ll just click to see it). This means that the sender’s account has probably been seized by malware, unknowing victims of the infection. They probably clicked on one of these messages, continuing the chain of infection.
Twitter has also been compromised by hackers as well. For example, on December 17, 2009, for the third time that year, Twitter was hacked by a group identifying itself as the “Iranian Cyber Army” which redirected Twitter users to a web page claiming responsibility for shutting down Twitter. This looked like mere “hactivism,” an attack with social or political motivation, but it could very well have been more malicious. It’s only a short step for those hackers to access your messages and use them for their own nefarious schemes, to your chagrin.
In August, 2009 FaceBook and YouTube were also compromised by hackers. In almost all cases, the entry point was a member’s weak password, a threshold that must be addressed by hosts and users if this type of hacking is to be stopped. See, Passwords for more information on this subject.
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